New Zealand’s "Interesting" Election

Crypto-Anarchists and Easy Dupes

This election season in New Zealand has been historic, unlike any previous election.  It had been distorted by a multi-millionaire German seeking to take control of the national political process to benefit his own voluminous pockets and to keep himself from incarceration in the United States.  We have not seen the like in New Zealand since Baron d’Thierry came to Hokianga in late 1837 on the Nimrod attempting to start a French colonial outpost in the face of British interests.  Herr Kim Dotcom is a latter day Baron d’Thierry, equally megalomaniacal.

And then we have had the hard left joining Dotcom in a madcap party which has combined capitalists in their most greedy, exploitative, and egregious manifestation with weird Maori and hard-left radicals deeply into Marxist ideology.  The chutzpah of the constituent  elements of this new Potemkin party has been breathtaking.  Their followers consist of the duped, the desperate, and the gullible. 

And, not to be outdone, we have had the hacking of a privately owned website and the theft of thousands of e-mails and private communications, followed by a breathless book authored by New Zealand’s leading conspiracist once again publishing stolen information.  The book, Dirty Politics has the author’s normal new-maths fingerprints all over it.  In Nicky Hager’s world two plus two makes seventy-five.

Most of the media have been agog and aghast, unable to calm their febrile pens and stuttering tongues for a moment so as to make sense of it all.  Except for one or two scribblers.  Fran O’Sullivan, writing just before the election, had this to say:

John Key goes into the home straight of the election campaign with his integrity publicly intact after the Kim Dotcom fiasco and voters well placed to make a judgment when it comes to the Key Government’s management of the NZ economy.  Key has been roundly attacked for declassifying documents to prove his point that the GCSB has not been involved in widespread surveillance of New Zealanders.

Bizarrely, it is somehow seen as perfectly all right for Dotcom and his associates to use stolen National Security Agency files to try to prove the Prime Minister a liar on how his Government has administered national security, but not for Key to declassify New Zealand’s own files to prove he isn’t a liar.

This is utter madness.

There is a common thread that links all these parties together–the corrupt capitalist, Dotcom, the Maori Marxists, and the sanctimonious conspiracist, Hager.  All hold in common the principle that theft is morally justifiable if it is for the “greater good”.  Moreover, they believe they personify the “greater good”.  Funny that.  Clearly, Dotcom has relished the theft of private emails, and, therefore, is complicit in the deed.  His “greater good” was to bring down the government and supplant it with one malleable to his attempts to avoid extradition to the US to face criminal charges.  Nicky Hager has not just relished the theft but has been even more complicit in the crime. He baldly asserts that his complicity in theft is entirely justifiable because he believes he is exposing the evils of government.  The “greater good”, as defined and interpreted by Hager, makes his theft righteous, but the government’s theft of private information (aka, spying) is utterly wicked–in Hager’s strange world.  Hager righteous; government wicked. Hager is, therefore, justified in doing evil that his particular and peculiar version of “the good” may come.

The Maori radical Marxists would do anything to bring down every government until they can, themselves govern.  Like Dotcom and Hager, their “greater good” is themselves.

All this brings us to the common thread.  They are all crypto-anarchists.  They have a common interest and desire to dismember the present state apparatus in New Zealand.  They all desire to set up their own version of a puppet state that would serve their own interests–which they believe, without question, to be everyone else’s greater good.  Their “greater good” is the same “greater good” that justified the deaths and dismemberment of millions upon millions in the previous century.  They alike relish thievery to achieve their narcissistic goals.  They do evil, that their version of good may come. 

And the media, the editors, the reporters that rubbed their hands with glee and participated in the evils, thereby, aiding and abetting them–they are just one small step removed from the crypto-anarchists.  They are the “useful idiots”, as Lenin used to call them.  Dumb and dumber.  Easy tools.  Self-righteous, sanctimonious fools who are unable to separate the “greater good” from their own commercial self-interest.  Easy dupes in the hands of crypto-anarchists, who are long experienced in the dark arts.

Ironically, it has been the ordinary joes, the voters, who have been entirely unimpressed.  It seems that from the start they have been able to discern amongst the participants who were the good, the bad, and the ugly. Their voice was heard loudly and emphatically on election day.  Lincoln’s axiom was once again evident and at work: you can fool all of the people some of the time; some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all of the time. 

Slow Learners

Bribery and Electoral Suborning

Since we have entered an election year, political bribery is in full swing.  At his first major announcement, the Labour leader, David Cunliffe announced new government spending that will cost well over $1 billion dollars per year.  Will the electorate be seduced by this bribe?  We will have to wait and see. 

New Zealand is just emerging from a long, dogged recession.  In the early days of the Global Financial Crisis (which hit just after our recession began in earnest) we were at risk of having a run on our banks.  The country was in a dangerous position of rapidly rising fiscal deficits at a time when no-one was lending.  Credit had dried up.  How come?  Because the previous Labour government had spent all the fiscal surplus and had committed to spending way beyond that in various electoral bribes, middle class welfare and unaffordable programmes, so that our deficit was inevitably going to become a black necklace around the nation’s throat. 

We can still hear the gleeful tones of the then Minister of Finance, Dr Michael Cullen as he taunted the Opposition with a peculiar channelling of Mother Hubbard  that the fiscal cupboard was now bare.  He had “spent it all”, he chortled.
  Apart from his reckless spending on Kiwi Rail, buying it back at a price no-one with a smidgen of financial prudence would have ever approved, the biggest new spending was upon Early Childhood Education (also known as over-engineered, gold plated, daycare centres) and Working For Families (a middle class welfare programme). 

They say that socialism eventually runs out of other people’s money.  Election bribery was in such full swing that not only had Labour run out of other people’s money, it had started spending money no-one had, thereby debt-enslaving our children and grandchildren. 

Through the last six difficult years the government has worked to reduce wasteful spending, increase its effectiveness, and return the nation to a fiscal surplus (before starting to pay down the billions of accumulated debt).  We are now just on the cusp of a surplus.  Economic growth is picking up pace.  Employment is starting to rise.  The hard and difficult climb is coming to an end. 

Labour’s response?  Reckless bribes of new spending to drive the country back into deficit and to start the cycle of spend, boom, bust, recession/depression all over again, making the struggles of the last six years a waste of time.  The question before us now is, Has the electorate learned its lesson, or will it be seduced and suborned by the bribes?  We will see. 

Cunliffe is denying that his bribery will increase the deficit.  His reckless new spending is going to be paid for by raising taxes, he says.  Oh, don’t worry.  It’s only the “rich” who are going to pay these new, higher taxes–but we won’t talk about that until after the election.  Two problems: Cunliffe has already defined households earning $150,000 per year as being worthy recipients of his new welfare bribes–so clearly, they are not rich in Cunliffe’s world.  So, a very, very small percentage of taxpayers are going to have to pay huge tax increases to pay the bill for the new spending.  And then there is the airily announced and long promised Labour capital gains tax, which is a fig.  Such taxes are very costly and complex to administer, and raise relatively little revenue.  We already have capital gains tax in New Zealand, but it is rarely enforced for those very reasons. 

Here is the most odious of the egregious bribes:

Most parents of newborns will get $60 a week until that baby turns 1, while those on middle and lower incomes will continue to receive the payment until the child turns 3.  Mr Cunliffe said the party had set the income threshold relatively high so that it would be near-universal, although its primary aim was to help address child poverty. (NZ Herald)

Cunliffe is either too dumb to consider, let alone understand, the perverse consequences of ill-conceived government policies, or he is too reckless to care.  The worst poverty occurs in the underclass, which is ridden with solo-mothers, dependant upon government welfare.  One of the easiest ways for such folk to achieve an increase in income is to fall pregnant and have another child. You get more of what you pay for.  Under Labour’s bribe, every new child born will increase a household’s income by over $3,000 per year. 

The perverse outcome?  A rapid increase in the numbers of solo mothers with four or more children with multiple anonymous fathers leading to further social dislocation and much worse child poverty, suffering, and degradation.  Cunliffe’s policy will exacerbate child poverty, not alleviate it.  He appears ignorant of human nature and its motivations–or, more likely, he foolishly tells himself that, “this time, it will be different”. 

The real issue is whether the electorate is going to be seduced or offended by such crass, reckless bribes.  We will see.

The Obamagaffe

Double Standards

We need a new term for the political science lexicon: Obamagaffe.  An Obamagaffe is when a politician verbally makes a substantial error and the Commentariat ignores it.  It’s a useful concept. 

“Candidate X just said he would boil babies in hot oil to reduce inflation.  But this was an Obamagaffe, so no problem there.”  An Obamagaffe is when commentators and media give the benefit of the doubt to the gaffer and does not take an error seriously.  The error is interpreted as a slip of the tongue, an exaggeration, hyperbole, a figure of speech, etc.  After all, to err is human, so it only makes the gaffer more likeable, provided, of course, it is a genuine Obamagaffe.

When Obama does not have his teleprompter as a prop he is well known for his vacuous, convoluted, aimless, long-winded responses.  Often times these are replete with Obamagaffes–errors of fact no-one–at least no-one of any “significance”–takes seriously.
  (In the political science lexicon, the opposite of an Obamagaffe is a Palingaffe.  A Palingaffe is when a ridiculous comment is attributed to a politician or a candidate which they never actually said, but the Commentariat repeats endlessly the story that they did, so that the end result is the same.  A second rate comedienne mimicking Sara Palin declared that she could see Russia from her front porch.  It was a humorous line which was subsequently attributed to Palin as something she literally said, and, therefore, incontrovertible evidence of her stupidity and third-rate education.)

In the recent presidential debate, President Obama delivered the biggest gaffe this campaign so far.  But it serves to make him more likeable and human, like ordinary mortals.  To err is human, right.  In other words, the Commentariat spontaneously judged it to be an Obamagaffe, and therefore not worthy of any serious comment.

Romney and Obama were debating petrol prices.  Obama was claiming that he actively supports more energy production in the US.  Here is Romney’s retort:

The proof of whether a strategy is working or not is what the price is that you’re paying at the pump. If you’re paying less than you paid a year or two ago, why, then, the strategy is working. But you’re paying more. When the president took office, the price of gasoline here in Nassau County was about $1.86 a gallon. Now, it’s $4.00 a gallon.

Pretty reasonable.  Here is Obama’s reply:

Well, think about what the governor — think about what the governor just said. He said when I took office, the price of gasoline was $1.80, $1.86. Why is that? Because the economy was on the verge of collapse, because we were about to go through the worst recession since the Great Depression, as a consequence of some of the same policies that Governor Romney’s now promoting. So, it’s conceivable that Governor Romney could bring down gas prices because with his policies, we might be back in that same mess.   (Emphasis, ours)

This is a monumental Obamagaffe.  The erstwhile law professor is arguing lower petrol prices are likely to cause terrible recessions.  Really.  That’s a profoundly novel economic doctrine.  Wonder if it will win the Nobel Prize?  Oh, wait.  Obama already has one of those.  Sure, for peace, but let’s not split hairs.

Now, we can charitably extend to Obama some sympathy for saying something monumentally stupid in the heat of the debate.  But for the Commentariat not to call it out as stupid, mistaken, wrong, etc  means that the gaffe has been universally judged to be an Obamagaffe.  A free pass for the President by the Commentariat.  Why?  Let the readers decide.

Polling Propaganda

 When the Media Massages the Message

The state of polling operating in the US election is dismal indeed.  Why?  Because media need to generate headlines to sell papers or get viewers.  In election season poll results are essential to do that.  So sub-standard, crummy polls are the order of the day–where “pollsters” call up Aunt Fanny and talk to her Chihuahua, and then record the Chihuahua as a certain Democratic voter.

 Jay Severin, a political campaign operator for over twenty-five years, explains why this is the case:

There are maybe five pollsters in America who could not successfully be sued for malpractice. There is nothing so common and useless in American media/”politics” than inept polls. Worse, it is easy and cheap to produce a “poll,” which hustlers and newspapers (forgive the redundancy), know is obviously inaccurate. Good polls, by good pollsters, are very difficult to produce ad very expensive.

The New York Times doesn’t want an accurate poll; they want the cheapest poll they can report by day-after-tomorrow. They do this by ignoring virtually all the tenets of a good poll in favor of quick/cheap/bad polls – which have an added advantage for the MSM: they are polls guaranteed to yield liberal results.

Why are these polls inaccurate? Of 100 Americans eligible to vote, only circa 1/3 of us turn out. So when you talk to non-voters (2/3 of the sample), you get non-results. But bad pollsters don’t care about that minor detail! They want a headline.  Most of the bad polls we see today are based on voter turn out models of 2008. Why? There has been a national election since then: 2010. Difference is Obama voters turned out/won 2008 – Tea Party/Patriots turned out in 2010.

Bottom line, the majority of polls we see are garbage. Average results of 10 bad polls, know what that yields? One bad average.  The real polling in this – and every campaign – is being done in strictest confidence by top pollsters, at a cost of $1Million+ Per Month! Know what NBC Pays per month for its polling? Same as your electric bill. Think that affects quality of results? . . .

If you want good polls check out Doug Schoen, Scott Rasmussen, or Pat Caddell.

We expect that talking heads and media pundits will be gravely informing us right up until the election that it is “too close to call”.

Media have a vested interest in ginning up the race, telling us how close it is to sell more of its product.  If the market thinks its a done deal, advertising revenue will end up going down as readers and viewers wander off to something else. That is the most benign explanation for covering over the actual polling results.  A more sinister explanation would finger ideological bias toward Democrats.

Here is an example of the current persistent distortion of results–this time from The Washington Post and ABC.

This morning, Washington Post & ABC released their latest poll of the presidential race. Naturally, they find Obama leading Romney by 3 points, 49-46. This is similar to their last poll, which found Obama leading by 2, 49-47.

Similar, but very, very different. Their last poll had a D+3 sample. (An assumption that Democratic voters are going to turn out to vote at a 3 percent higher rate than historically has been the case.  The poll is weighted in the Democrat’s favour.) Today, though, to keep Obama where he was, they had to juice the sample to D+9. So, WaPo’s poll is based on an unrealistic best-case scenario for Democrat turnout, and Obama is still under 50%.

Doom.  In 2008, Democrats enjoyed their biggest turnout advantage in decades. The electorate was D+7. That year, Obama won the election by 7 points. Today’s WaPo poll, against all available evidence, envisions an electorate that is even more Democrat, tipping the scales to give the Dems a +9 advantage. Even then, Obama’s lead is only 3 points, and he is still stuck at the nettlesome 49%.

Keep in mind, the previous poll from WaPo was conducted before the first presidential debate. That was widely seen as a complete disaster for Obama. Even in today’s poll, WaPo finds that, by a 51-point margin, voters thought Romney won the debate. Yet, today’s poll assumes that Democrats will have a 3x greater turnout edge than the previous poll. WaPo and ABC would have you believe that there has been the greatest surge to the Democrat party ever recorded.

A Romney landslide?  Could be.  We recall the talking heads gravely saying that the Carter/Reagan election was “too close to call” right up to the day–and we all know how that turned out.  

Unworthy and Shameful

The Curse of Unethical Immoral Leaders

We don’t know why this should be the case, but it does seem that left-wing governments and political parties have a perpetual nastiness about them. 

Over time this creates rising political risks since demonising your opponents means that all they have to do is show up to the electorate as reasonably normal people and in an instant two things happen.  The first is the credibility of the slanderous overkill party goes up in smoke.  The second is that the electorate find those so excessively slandered to be much better than expected.  He or she turn out to be a pleasant surprise. 

Obama and the Democrats in the United States appear to have fallen into this trap.
  Unable to run on Obama’s record over the past four years they have spent millions upon millions of dollars portraying Mitt Romney as a black beast of terrible proportion.  Then Romney shows up as a normal guy who smiles and jokes at the first TV debate and hey presto people are really pleasantly surprised.  But they are also miffed that the other mob has lied and misled and slandered for so long and they feel a bit guilty that they got sucked in there for a while. 

The Australian Labour Government appears to be making the same mistake.  This year they have demonised opposition leader, Tony Abbott.  Paul Sheehan, writing in The Sydney Morning Herald, shows just how badly Labour has been behaving. 

Tony Abbott is a hack. A dog. An aggressive, carping, bitter, mindless, deceptive, dodgy, mendacious, rancid, negative, nasty, muck-raking, untruthful, obstructionist, opportunistic, sexist, political Neanderthal. He is unfit for high office. He cannot control his temper. No trick is too low for him. No stunt is too wild. He is a bully. A thug. A snake oil salesman. A poster child for vile bully-boy values. He has repulsive double standards. He hates women. He stands for nothing. He has unhealthy obsessions. He is nuts.

Abbott behaves like Jack the Ripper. He is Gina Rinehart’s butler. He is Nancy Reagan without the astrology. He is a douchebag.

I’m quoting here, mostly from Hansard. These are not comments from media figures, or feral demonstrators, or dredged up from 10 or even 30 years ago. These are insults delivered this year, by federal Labor MPs, directed at one person, and orchestrated by Julia Gillard. The level of personal insult has been on an industrial scale.

Just like Romney all Abbott needs to do is turn up on a national stage during an election campaign and appear even vaguely human and he will be a resounding success.  Meanwhile Labour will have discredited itself as untrustworthy.  Electorates can get vindictive over such things.  Character assassination of Tony Abbott might make the Labour Government look good in its own eyes for a while, but beware the electorate scorned. 

Ethically, of course, it is shameful.  It is immoral.  It is evil.  Politicians who engage in such behaviour are unworthy of trust.  Here is Sheehan’s assessment of how low it has become:

But it is this government’s concentration on Abbott’s character that sets it apart. It is the tactic on which the Gillard government has staked its survival, the politics of the personal, of targeting character, of hammering the same message about the same person, by every minister, until it seeps into the public mind.

The strategy was unveiled at the beginning of the year with some of the worst political bastardry from the nation’s leadership seen in a long time. It started with an Australia Day address at the National Press Club delivered by Anthony Albanese on January 25. By convention this is a respite from political hatchet jobs, but Albanese launched into Abbott’s character, describing him as ”One Trick Tony”, that one trick being ”more negativity, more nastiness, more obstructionism”.

This was standard from Albanese, but something much nastier came out of the Prime Minister’s own office the next day, Australia Day. A group of Aboriginal demonstrators had gathered at the tent eyesore in Canberra. A member of Gillard’s staff alerted one of the people at the demonstration and said, falsely, that Abbott was nearby and had just denigrated the Aboriginal tent embassy.

Australia Day 2012 was thus marked by a hostile mob surrounding the Leader of the Opposition, berating him, banging on windows, making threats. In an irony that could become a metaphor, the Prime Minister, herself at the same function, got caught up in the mess.

Julia Gillard’s nefarious behaviour reached a pinnacle recently when she accused Tony Abbott of mysogyny, ironically whilst she was defending her Speaker’s absolutely crude statements about women made in some e-mails.   It seems that the brazen lying effrontery knows no bounds:

Then came the climax last week, when Gillard exploded in rage in the Parliament after she had been caught in the implosion of the reputation of the Speaker, Peter Slipper, a failure by the Prime Minister in every respect, tactical, ethical, moral and political.

Abbott was ruthless in exploiting the failure and Gillard was ruthless in defending it: ”It is misogyny, sexism, every day from this Leader of the Opposition. Every day, in every way … I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man … If he wants to know what misogyny looks like in modern Australia … he needs a mirror … I am offended by the sexism, by the misogyny, of the Leader of the Opposition …”

It was mesmerising. It was great television. Of course Twitter went into a fever (Labor MP Steve Gibbons tweeted: ”That douchebag Tony Abbott.”) Of course the speech went viral on social media. The Prime Minister’s outrage would have resonated with every woman who has endured boorish men. But was the accusation of misogyny true? No. Was it ethical? No. Was it a diversion? Yes. Was it part of a pattern? Yes. Was it good politics? We shall see.

When government’s and political leaders deliberately dissemble and lie for their political advantage and when they falsely attack and defame others in the process it is time for them to ascend the scaffold and go to the block.  Voters have a way of passing sentence and carrying out the necessary execution.  As Sheehan says, we shall see. 

 

Unfit for Public Office

Cynical Manipulation

In the recent history of our country we have had more than our fair share of venal politicians who cynically and deliberately set out to mislead the electorate.  Such politicians view the people as ignorant sheep, easily gulled. They come out with slogans or sound-bites they know are deceptive and misleading.  However, they also know that their sound-bites will appeal to the ignorant sheep.  They use such tactics to manipulate the electorate to gain support–all the while knowing that, once in government, they will never have to carry out their stated intentions. 

Our current proportional representation encourages that kind of venality amongst politicians.  The Greens, for instance, are masters of the art.
  They can appeal to the worse instincts of the electorate knowing they will never have to face up to the responsibility of putting their policy into practice.

The Greens in this election are promising a wonderland of peace, prosperity, health, welfare–every good thing imaginable.  They are presenting themselves as the party that can lead New Zealand to become rich (a huge about face for the Greens, which have been anti-economic development, anti-growth since they first existed as a political party.)  They don’t have to worry about funding all the goodies that are going to deliver because the gazillion dollar green global economy is going to deliver it.  In their heart of hearts they know that this is just hogwash–but that is not important: they will never have to deliver on their promises. 

The Greens cynically manipulate the electorate, appealing to the worst cargo-cult instincts of New Zealand society.  A bucket of money will come tumbling down out of the sky.  The cargo-cult mentality has bedevilled this country for generations.  Now the bucket is the multi-gazillion dollar global green economy.  Amongst the ignorant and the easily duped, it works.  The Greens get returned to Parliament as a minority party; they continue to promote their brand of extreme left wing social policies; the big green global money bucket in the sky gets evoked every time they promote more government deficit spending. 

Such cynical political behaviour is of the same ilk as Winston Peters’s regular outing down the electoral promenade with his racist xenophobic poodle in tow.  However, Peters is not a racist.  Never has been.  Taking his racist poodle for a walk was just a manipulative ploy of useful idiots come election time. 

The Labour Party is showing similar traits this election.  Knowing that the chances of returning to government are remote they have been “liberated” to espouse all kinds of simplistic nonsense, knowing they will never have to deliver.  Take, for example, the proposal to raise the minimum wage to close the burgeoning wage gap with Australia.  Leader Goff assures us that putting up the minimum wage and closing the gap with Australia will suddenly bring about a miraculous economic transformation of the country.  Once again, the useful idiots are easily duped.  But are they?  

Such political behaviour is the hallmark of a minority party–a cynical electoral stratagem to curry favour all the while knowing that Labour will never have to deliver.  (One wonders whether Labour has  self-consciously adopted the behaviours of a minority party, or it has just slipped into it, out of desperation.) 

The reality is that over time, voters are more sensible than they are given credit for.  They are not perpetually fooled or gulled.  That is why, in the end, Peters lost his seat.  The Greens are now trying to re-invent themselves as the party of wealth and prosperity and economic development.  Their earlier mantra of a return to pre-industrial idyllic subsistence living has been evaluated and rejected.  In the end the electorate will reject the gazillion dollar green sky bucket as well. 

The media, the so-called fourth estate of government, is supposed to subject all politicians and all parties to exacting scrutiny.  But they rarely do.  Why?  Because, like reef fish the media clusters around food–and food for the media is controversy and contest.  They need a contest.  When one party has become dominant in the polls, their mode is to encourage and talk up all other parties to create the appearance of a hotly contested election.  It all sells more papers and increases viewer numbers–the key to revenue. 

But, once again, such cynical manipulation of the process fails in the longer term.  The media itself become judged by the people and they lose respect.  Increasingly people seek for analysis and news in “new media” outlets.  Credibility is lost. 

As Lincoln put it so aptly: you can fool some of the people all of  time; you can fool all of the people some of the time; but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. 

Unrepresentative Parliaments

When The Tail Wags the Dog

The principle of proportional representation has inherent merit.  It reflects a principle of justice.  In a democracy, government should reflect the will of the people collectively expressed as much as possible.  The diversity of “wills” should be represented to some degree in the deliberative and legislative chambers.

The principle becomes somewhat more necessary and compelling in a state where there is a unicameral parliament–such as we have in New Zealand, and where the executive branch of government is an extension of Parliament.  Checks and balances are rather thin on the ground in Aotearoa.
  The most effective check and balance is our being a very small country–both in terms of size and population.  Politicians can never get far away from the people.  The cut of a politician is generally quite well known by his local community.  Elections are a powerful restraint upon politicians who stray too far from the general electoral consensus.  (This, by the way, is a reason why we do not favour extending the electoral term beyond three years.  There are insufficient checks upon governmental arrogance in New Zealand’s constitutional arrangements as it is.  Without more checks and balances we would not like to see the governmental term extended.)

We acknowledge that the whole idea of restraint of judicial, executive, and legislative powers is under threat in the West.  This is ironic for countries whose history has been adorned by the blood lust of tyrants.  Checks and balances and governments of limited power are concepts which arise out of a wider consensus and conviction about the fallen immoral and intrinsically corrupt nature of man.  A foreign concept now.  Through hard experience the West learned about the horrors of tyrants.  It rejected the absolute authority of rulers because it fundamentally eschewed the possibility of human perfection–anywhere, anytime, of anyone in this fallen world.  If you believe an absolute ruler is fundamentally corrupt and sinful, you will want to watch any such authority carefully, with scrupulous attention.  Hence, the Western idea of limited government, protected by a constitutional system of checks and balances.

Today, however, the Christian notion of fallibility and sinfulness has long since gone the way of the dodo.  Unbelief and secular humanism is comfortable with the idea of potential human perfection;  never is this more the case when it comes to government.  It is axiomatic today that if a government is doing something, its actions and principles must be inherently superior–both in morality and efficacy–to the actions of private citizens.  Whilst ethical peccadilloes are the common experience of the man-in-the-street, it is generally agreed that governments are not so flawed.  Somehow government is regarded as operating on a morally superior plane of existence.

Elections, then, in New Zealand perform a very helpful check and balance upon the inherent corruption of politicians.  It is a good thing to have diversity of views represented proportionally in representative body of Parliament.  Hence proportional representation is a good thing.

But there are some significant flaws in our current PR system.  The first is the system of “list MPs”  and party votes where people can become legislators without ever having to face voters and win their confidence.  This opens up the door to elites and people with extremist views being able to force their peculiar prejudices upon an electorate that has never had a chance to approve them as people to represent them. 

The invidious consequences of such a flawed system are now evident in the case of the NZ Labour Party.  Its official membership can be counted on the fingers of one hand.  It has no money, being unable to raise any.  Its candidate list is thoroughly unrepresentative of New Zealand society in any proportional sense.  Its inner workings are dominated by list MP’s who do not face voters directly.  We believe that such a bizarre circumstance can only exist by “virtue” of our current proportional representation system.

Secondly, an effective proportional system must recognise and reflect the reality of “trade-offs” in human action.  Therefore, preferential voting is much to be, well, preferred.  Let us say we cast a vote for party A.  But, there are a few things about Party A that are unsupportable.  On the other hand, Party B is fundamentally not as sound in our view, but it is a whole lot better than Party C and Party D.  Preferential voting allows voters to make such expressions of their will be known.  It is a system congruent with just about every other decision we make in this life.  As one astute observer put it: life is full of problems.  Making decisions is a matter of deciding which set of problems you are prepared to live with.

Preferential voting systems reflect just such a reality.  Moreover, they usually result in one party having a clear majority–a majority where the balance of the electorate is prepared to live with the legislative consequences, even if they may not agree with everything.  A majority of the electorate has said they are prepared to “live with” the problems that accompany a particular government.  Preferential voting allows for just such an outcome–which is inherently more proportional and just than our current system.

Our current system has one more inherent and offensive weakness.  It rarely provides a majority government.  As a result, backroom deals need to be done with other parties, most of whom will be small parties, representing a very, very small minority of voters.  Yet, through the negotiation process these small, minor, unrepresentative parties can extract huge concessions, inflicting their will upon an unwilling majority of voters.  It is this injustice where makes the current system of proportional representation so odious to many in New Zealand.  The country hates the undue influence of extremely small parties.

The current system of proportional representation clearly needs changing.  We hope that the referendum soon to be held will be a first step in allowing appropriate changes to be made.