The MMP threshold is set at 5%. The threshold means that the vast majority of parties who don’t win electorates need around 150,000 voters to enter Parliament. The eternal commissions always call to knock 1% off of this - now they support another .5% decrease - and their mild-mannered demands accomplish nothing. Forget that: let’s end the threshold entirely!
Parties receive a percentage of Parliament’s 120 MPs equal to their percentage of the party vote. The system is simple and egalitarian. However, under the MMP threshold, 5-15% of voters each election put in the same effort as everybody else to consider their choice, to show up and vote, and for their trouble their effort is wasted and their choice disregarded. That failure of democracy occurs whether we implement any commission’s recommendations or not. We only ensure a fair voting system by abolishing the threshold.
With no threshold, your party would receive their first MP at 0.8% of the vote, or about 23,500 voters currently. Getting ten thousand people to do anything is enormously difficult; most of us will never manage to in our lifetimes. This new de facto threshold continues to favour leaders with clear purpose and good ideas over troublemakers and joke parties. The choice of the protest vote remains; they’re still not getting in.
If we look back over the past decade, only a handful of parties clear this .8% bar. New Conservative are the only fresh contender who can put together more than a couple MPs - controversial, to be sure, but you can see how they’d slot right into a coalition. NZFirst would scrape, bloodied, through 2020. Quirky hawkers of shiny ideas like Internet Mana and TOP would gain a couple each. The fringe would nab a sole MP (Advance NZ’s Billy Te Kahika, 2020).
These changes would mean a lot to their voters but very little to most of the country. Our major parties dominate, our mid-tier parties compete strongly, and that leaves only a few seats changing hands on the margins.
The vast majority of the time, elections are not close enough to be decided by parties with one or two MPs. For an election result to hinge on the fringe requires any given election deliver an 60-60 deadlock or thereabouts. Never say never, but I’m not losing any sleep.
Political parties know that this scenario would be a nightmare. That is what keeps them honest. Voters can smell an unviable coalition a mile off. This is why National’s “rowing in different directions” ad worked so well in 2014 and why Andrew Little’s Labour could not viably lead a three-headed hydra in 2017. Our democracy does not tolerate Frankensteining a hodgepodge of idiosyncratic parties together, compared to the likes of the Netherlands’ consensus EU politicking or Israel’s polarisation and factionalism.
Consequently, all parties will shun edge cases like Internet Mana or Advance during elections, making a vote for them look useless, and refuse to negotiate with them afterwards. Any MPs seeking to grab attention will be left to sit by themselves and starved of oxygen in the world’s most boring room, with them and their followers mind-numbed out of Parliament.
If all else fails we break glass and go again - from Aus ‘75 to UK ‘19, retreading close elections typically produces decisive results. Dragging out election season isn’t fun, but three extra weeks is a small cost to safeguard the next three years. We punish the party stupid enough to put us all in this position and move on. All in all, like a system better exposed safely to the virus than left unvaccinated, the body politic adapts to resist dangers.
The goal of canning the threshold is to revive democratic engagement declining across the West. When everybody knows their vote now matters, they go vote. When people with valuable experience and perspective now see a chance to bring their ideas to Parliament, they run.
The introduction of MMP in the 90s was the only fresh life third parties have received in our country. Since then, one by one, the lights at the parties have gone out, even as the choice between those still up has grown less appealing still. A good third of the population absolutely are interested in minor parties but needs to know that they will get in.
Let me be honest: we don’t know exactly how this would play out. This would almost be another first-in-the-world move for Aotearoa. We’ve done bolder things with the vote before, against the global grain, and wouldn’t you know it, the world still turned. Every year parties are dying and voters are giving up. We can stay, or we can experiment in the laboratory of our democracy once more. I know which choice will count for more.
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