Online exclusive
Opinion: As Christopher Luxon laments the divisive distraction of David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill, he has taken to blaming the electoral system for the pickle he finds himself in.
“We’re in an MMP environment; that’s the system that New Zealand has voted for, and we have to operate within that,” Luxon said recently, explaining why he will provide life support for the Bill to select committee stage, then euthanise it.
Luxon’s conundrum neatly encapsulates the trouble we’ve got ourselves into with MMP, which will celebrate its 30th birthday at the next election.
The electoral system itself is fine. The diversity of representation and the voice it has given to previously marginalised voters make it superior, in my view, to the First-Past-the-Post (FPP) system that preceded it.
It’s not the rules of the game that need to change but the way the players are playing the game. The culture of MMP needs to change, otherwise it will seriously hold the country back.
The first problem stems from our inability to leave behind the rigid left-right division of the adversarial FPP system. We may have ditched the Labour-National duopoly of FPP, but the left and right blocs remain: the Greens and Te Pāti Māori will work only with Labour and Act only with National.
Often that leaves Winston Peters to play a game of arbitrage in the middle, playing the blocs off against each other before allowing the most generous suitor to occupy the Treasury benches. We haven’t had an MMP election without Peters (who has been part of four MMP governments), so much of our MMP experience has been a game of “who will he go with” and “what does he want”?
Our political leaders should be encouraged – maybe even forced – to be open to negotiations with all parties, as they seek to form a government after an election. They should not rule out working with other parties, as is common today. That would reduce the leverage of minor parties, but it would also develop a culture of forming cross-party relationships.
If National, as the largest party after the 2023 election, could have turned to the Greens and/or Te Pāti Māori, Luxon wouldn’t be spending valuable political capital fighting culture wars over Crown-Māori relations.
If you think National working with the Greens and Te Pāti Māori is far-fetched, recall that John Key brought the Māori Party into government and also had a Memorandum of Understanding with the Green Party. It can be done.
The culture of coalition agreements needs to change, too. Minor parties demanding a long list of specific policies to satisfy the base is problematic. Highly prescriptive coalition agreements have not led to popular and successful MMP governments.
The first MMP government between National and New Zealand First in 1996 was hammered out over two months and resulted in a 73-page agreement. It tried to nail down everything from how much advertising could be on TV One (10 minutes in any one hour) to a “thorough census of the Kaimanawa horse population” and everything in between. But it lasted only 18 months before New Zealand First walked out over the sale of Wellington Airport.
The coalition governments led by Helen Clark and then John Key (both of which lasted nine years) were based on much looser arrangements that charted general directions and values. The trouble with locking everything down on day one is that governments need to be agile to adapt as events arise during a three-year term.
Because National has agreed to a grab-bag of demands from Act and New Zealand First, the overall agenda seems to lack coherency. In my view, that is the reason Luxon has not enjoyed the popularity that Clark and Key had as prime ministers.
National’s polling has been stuck in the late 30s – where it sat after the election. Both Clark and Key routinely had their parties above 50%.
It’s hard to provide strong leadership under MMP. Luxon hasn’t yet developed the radar to assess when the national (and National) interest is threatened by the demands of his coalition partners and how to flex his Prime Ministerial muscle when he needs to.
Clark ran minority governments, but still managed to kill off policies she felt would derail her government. During a business revolt in 2000 (dubbed the “winter of discontent”), she killed off Alliance plans for employer-funded paid parental leave simply by telling the media it would happen “over my dead body”. Key did something similar to his coalition partner Act in his first term.
National had agreed to the 2025 Taskforce, which recommended a clutch of neoliberal economic policies to close the income gap with Australia, such as asset sales and tax cuts. Act learnt via the media that none of it would happen.
As the big player sometimes, you just have to call the smaller player’s bluff. Otherwise, you can spend months fighting over something like the Treaty Principles Bill, which only one party (with 8% of the vote) in the entire Parliament wants and is guaranteed to fail.
Luxon can blame MMP. But it’s not the system itself. It’s the way we are playing the game.
Guyon Espiner is an investigative journalist and presenter at RNZ.
