The campaign to change New Zealand’s voting system to MMP was led by those who wanted a more representative parliament. Supporters, shown cutting an MMP cake, included (from left) Anglican clergyman Richard Randerson, author Patricia Grace and Black Power president Rei Harris. (Photo: Phil Reid, Alexander Turnbull Library. Ref: EP/1993/3398/14-F)
MMP was supposed to deliver more representative democracy. The coalition agreement makes a mockery of that, writes Brian Tweed.
Taking part in the hīkoi in November last year was a wonderful experience in many ways. Although the Treaty principles bill was a catalyst, the hīkoi was clearly about something much bigger. It was also a protest against the coalition government in general and an expression of the reality of Māori existence.
Many banners and placards objected to the government, not just the bill, and many expressed the right of Māori to exist and flourish. At one point, I was following someone carrying a placard that said: “This is what happens when you make a s**t coalition agreement.”
Since then, I’ve been thinking about the placard and how it gets at something of fundamental importance that it seems very few people are asking questions about: the formation of coalition agreements. Connected with this is a confusion between what parliament is and what the government is.
Parliament is the collection of all MPs awarded seats based on the proportion of votes their parties receive in a general election or by winning a constituency.
The government, in contrast, is the subgroup of MPs in parliament who band together to create a majority that usually locks out just under half of elected MPs from government and consigns them to “the opposition”. Parliament and the government are two different entities, and it’s important not to confuse the two, as, unfortunately, many politicians do.
Under MMP, the formation of a coalition agreement has taken on a vital role in determining the nature of the government. This should receive much more critical attention.
From my perspective, our current government seems both undemocratic and unrepresentative.
It’s undemocratic because the government has made decisions and pursues policies that were not mandated by the election.
For example, the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill, a possible Treaty referendum, the Fast-track Approvals Bill, repeal of the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products (Smoked Tobacco) Amendment Act, defunding humanities research, and other unilateral decisions were certainly not endorsed by the 2023 election results.
It’s unrepresentative because the composition of the government is not consistent with the distribution of votes cast in the election. For example, 92 percent of voters didn’t vote for ACT, yet it is unarguably an influential force in government, wielding power far in excess of its 8 percent share of the vote.
More than 40 percent of voters voted for Labour, the Greens or Te Pāti Māori, yet none of these parties is represented in government. Less than 15 percent voted for ACT or New Zealand First, yet the leaders of these two minor parties share the Deputy Prime Minister role, and other members of these parties carry other important ministerial portfolios.
It feels like our country has been hijacked and redirected to a destination most of us never intended to go to.
But all previous governments formed under MMP are also open to the same charge. MMP has never delivered a representative government.
In the 2017 election, National gained the most votes and seats in parliament but wasn’t able to form a government after New Zealand First decided to go into a coalition with Labour, with support from the Greens. So, National, despite winning the most seats in parliament and votes overall, had no representation in government.
Our current electoral system is called Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) and was intended to fix the problems of unrepresentative governments. The first MMP election was in 1996.
Before this, we had the First Past the Post system (FPP). In FPP, which is still used in the UK, Canada, and the US, the country was divided into constituencies, with people casting a single vote for a candidate in each constituency. Parliament was then made up of the candidates who won a constituency. The party that claimed the most constituencies usually could form a government, which meant that single-party governments were the norm under FPP.
During the 1970s and ‘80s, there was growing discontent with FPP because parliaments and governments didn’t reflect the number of votes parties received in the election. There were elections, for example, in which the party forming the government, by winning the most seats, did not receive the most votes nationally. In 1978 and 1981, the National Party formed governments, but Labour got the largest number of votes overall.
MMP tried to fix this problem by giving everyone two votes: a constituency vote and a party vote.
There was plenty of careful consideration before the introduction of MMP in 1996. In 1986, a Royal Commission reported in favour of MMP. This was followed by two national referendums in 1992 and 1993, with the 1993 referendum being binding on the government.
In 2011, a further referendum was included with the election itself to check if MMP was still preferred. There was an increase in the proportion of people supporting MMP at the time. Even so, as the 2017 and 2023 elections demonstrate, MMP has not fixed the problem of unrepresentative governments.
Under MMP, the makeup of parliament has some resemblance to the makeup of our very diverse society, and arguably, MMP has produced representative parliaments. However, MMP hasn’t been effective in producing representative governments.
This is due to a very tight focus on the process of electing members of parliament and virtually no attention being paid to the process of forming a government after the MPs in parliament have been decided.
Under MMP, coalition governments are the norm. Only the 2020 election has resulted in a single-party majority government (Labour with 65 seats). This means that once election results are in, a period of negotiation must follow to figure out who can form a government and with what agreements. The problem here is that there are no rules governing how a coalition government is formed. The process is left entirely to the politicians to figure out, and they can do virtually anything they like as long as it’s legal. This is First Past the Post again, through the back door.
Minority coalition governments can be based on creative interpretations of established practices such as formal coalition agreements (in which two or more parties form a government and decide on everything together) and confidence and supply agreements (in which one party agrees to support another but is not part of the government).
Politicians can also invent new practices, as Labour did in 2020 by forming a “cooperation agreement” with the Green Party.
Politicians are free to make up any arrangement that allows the formation of a government, and there is every possibility that this will be for the benefit of the parties and individuals involved rather than for the benefit of the country as a whole. We had a glaring example of this recently when National MPs argued against ACT’s Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill and then voted for it because of the coalition agreement. How is this democratic?
The Cabinet Manual (2023) states that:
The process of forming a government is political, and the decision to form a government must be arrived at by politicians.
This seems off to me. Politicians alone form a government? With no oversight at all? Is there no mechanism that regulates how politicians can form a government? Well, they have to obey the law, but governments make new laws and change existing ones, so this provides little comfort.
Have we been asking for trouble since 1996, and has the current government finally delivered it?
MMP, more or less, gives us a representative parliament, but then a coalition agreement can deliver up unrepresentative and undemocratic governments.
It has become clear, especially if you study the Regulatory Standards Bill, that the coalition government aims to complete the final instalment of a neoliberal ideology which would reduce our society to recognising only individual (and corporate) property rights and clear the way for unfettered exploitation and privatisation of our natural resources and public assets. If we examine the new bills and changes this government is making as a whole, no other conclusion is possible.
Yet how many of us voted to be made less valuable than property, to be exploited and privatised?
The coalition agreement has made National and New Zealand First indistinguishable from ACT. They have merged and lurched to the right. In effect, votes cast for National and New Zealand First have been appropriated through the coalition agreement to enable ACT. Is this what National and New Zealand First voters wanted?
The stakes could not be higher. This could lead to the destruction of New Zealand itself in all but name.
Several other countries use the MMP system, including Germany, Mexico and South Korea. In all of them, coalition agreements are unregulated. As in New Zealand, the only requirement is that agreements are made public after they’ve been decided, which, of course, is too late.
The obvious response is that coalition negotiations should be regulated. But this would undoubtedly be fiercely opposed by politicians for self-serving reasons. It would also call into question a deeper underlying problem: the party system itself, which creates artificial demarcation lines preventing parties from cooperating with each other.
An existing coalition government is also unlikely to legislate that future coalition agreements must be regulated because this could mean they never gain power again.
This calls for regulation at the constitutional level, but another major problem exists here. New Zealand doesn’t have an explicit written constitution. Instead, constitutional components are distributed between UN declarations on human and Indigenous rights, existing laws, common law practices, court decisions and precedence, and Te Tiriti of Waitangi.
In this deliberately informal constitutional environment, how to create regulation of coalition agreements, which is a constitutional issue, becomes very unclear amid the morass of distributed constitutional fragments.
This also creates conditions in which a coalition agreement and the laws created through it can usurp constitutional power.
This is most obvious in the Regulatory Standards Bill, which essentially would be a law to govern all other laws, forcing them to abide by ACT party values.
Passing this bill is part of the coalition agreement, which means the government can (and almost certainly will) make it law regardless of public opposition to it. This makes a mockery of government claims that people should “have a say” about the laws they have to live with. So much for democracy.
One of the central tenets of our constitution should be that all governments (not just parliaments) are representative of the people as a whole, but we don’t have this.
Ensuring that we have representative governments, as a constitutional issue, must be decided through truly democratic processes where we can all participate and deliberate deeply — the practice of wānanga comes to mind.
We should go far beyond the crude and very corruptible competitive systems we currently have for making decisions that are central to our very existence — for example, referendums in which just 51 percent wins.
The problem of coalition agreements won’t go away and may well get worse in future elections. They should be regulated. Then our democracy might be closer to being democratic and more secure.
Brian Tweed is a senior lecturer in sociology, history and politics of education at Te Kura o te Mātauranga, Te Kunenga ki Pūrehūroa / Massey University.
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The other option worth looking at, is the Swiss model, where all the parties of any size are represented on the Federal Council, a seven-member collective Presidency whose chairman/chairwomanship is rotated on an annual basis. In our context, that would look like two MPs from National, two from Labour, and one each from NZFirst, ACT and the Greens. It works in a Swiss context, partly because a lot of responsibility is delegated to the cantons (something like Australian states but a lot smaller). The problem, though, is when governments have to take difficult or unpleasant decisions – as every government does. Labour’s changes after 1984 are a case in point.
The fundamental problem with the New Zealand system of representative democracy (an MMP variant of the Westminster system) is that the politicians are not accountable to the public. They claim to be. They point out that if the people have second thoughts they will be able to correct their mistake in three years time. (Four years time if the current crop of politicians get their way). This, when we are told that “a week is a long time in politics”. Which makes three years an eternity. The politicians say that three years is not long enough to put in place positive change for the good. But we know that it is more than enough time to do profound damage to the social and economic fabric. Indeed long enough to mortally wound the nation itself. And then when the time of decision comes around again, in three or maybe four years, all the people have is one brief opportunity to make another mistake. Because the system itself has become corrupted to the point where it is now incapable of manifesting or responding to the will of the people.
So what is the answer? It is not less democracy, as most of the western world seems to be saying. It is more democracy. A democracy in which the politicians really are accountable to the people. That means continuous election, self-determined constituencies of variable size and the open ballot. These will strike some as novel and radical ideas, but in fact they are the norm in all primitive or natural democracies and are the rule within the House of Representatives itself. The House is made up of self-determined caucuses of variable size. Every member’s vote is made openly and recorded as such. The House can overturn a government on any sitting day through a vote of no-confidence. If, and only if, those rules applied to the ordinary citizen we would truly enjoy “government of the people for the people by the people”.
This vision of genuine democracy is achievable and it would result in more stable government and more consistent policy directions by giving a real voice to the mass of people. It would have many other significant benefits. For one, electoral fraud would become impossible, and false allegations of electoral fraud would become unbelievable.
The argument that real democracy of this type (essentially rangatiratanga) is impossible to implement on the scale of modern nation states rings hollow. We have the technology to make it possible. It would be easier and cheaper to implement than the present system.
But it comes at the cost of giving the people the privileges and rights which the politicians consider to belong exclusively to themselves and thus will never be freely implemented by the present colonialist regime. The people, nga tangata motu, must establish this new and old system of governance for themselves and by themselves. They can do that by degrees. All that is required is the will.