Prime Minister Says Yes To MMP Referendum

The Prime Minister has suddenly called for a referendum on MMP. And we all know exactly why.

As discussed in Part Eight, MMP is the system we run our elections under. The primary impact of MMP is that it ensures minor parties get a lot more MPs and major parties have a lot less control. Major parties like Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s National Party.

The political headlines of recent weeks have been dominated by two narratives. One: Luxon is a bumbler. He mumbled out a ruleout of Opportunity. He presumed that it hadn’t occurred to Kiwi business owners to start innovating until he told them to. This kind of unravelling is just what I’ve been pointing at for months - that the longer Luxon spends in the role, the more anxious and less confident he becomes. 

Two: NZFirst are the nasty party. Stuart Nash called a newborn’s mum (who also happened to be one of Luxon’s colleagues) lazy - the laziest, in fact, that he’d ever known. Winston Peters described the Greens as ret***s. And you might not even have heard about that second one, because he buried that the next day by hollering at Lawrence Xu-Nan, who came to this country a decade before I did, to “go back to your country”. (Xu-Nan is widely credited across all parties save Winston’s as one of the most intelligent and active new members of Parliament, bringing fresh blood to the institution.)

Luxon’s sweating. Swing voters - women in their fifties - don’t want to support openly, explicitly sexist and racist governments. Luxon could swat down Stuart Nash, a long-troubled candidate outside Parliament. Luxon couldn’t sack Winston Peters. Peters would then simply call and win a vote of no confidence. This would trigger an early election whose primary question would be “can the coalition work together?”, and Luxon would have to campaign on three more years of the coalition working together. Luxon has resigned himself to a safer but equally humiliating contradiction: calling his Foreign Minister racist, and continuing to employ him as the guy whose job it is to talk nice to foreigners. 

Clearly, he isn’t happy being stuck with Winston Peters. And he wouldn’t be stuck with Winston Peters if MMP hadn’t come in in 1996. Hence: the referendum. 

This is, of course, a ridiculously impractical conclusion. No voter is prioritising a referendum on MMP right now. Luxon’s own caucus seem baffled by him blurting this out. And as his own Deputy Prime Minister has pointed out, campaigning in 2026, on a referendum in 2029, about what to do in 2032, - nobody believes Luxon will still be around by then.

Set all that aside. What would happen if MMP went away?

This is one of those questions where people more up-to-speed on the subject matter will go down the wrong rabbit hole. Electoral reform proponents love to argue about first past the post versus single transferable vote, multi-member seats and whatever the hell the D’hondt method quotient is. I’ve given my own thoughts on this before (fuse STV into MMP). 

But we need to zoom out and understand that, whatever choices we individual voters get to make, there are two big-picture possibilities for the outcome: either the new system will allow proportionality, and create a Parliament roughly representative of what the public wants - one which looks pretty similar to our current one, in which case we have nothing to discuss - or it won’t: the number of seats available for minor parties will significantly decline, and the major parties will pick them up.

This is the disproportionate world Luxon dreams of: one where National could fare poorly across the country and still pick up lots of seats, just like the good old days.

For National, there would be two problems with this dream world.

Number one: the idea of a major party struggling for votes and still grasping power tightly cuts both ways. If you brought in that system tomorrow, then Labour could conceivably romp home with a majority on around 35% of the vote, just as UK Labour did a couple of years ago. If Luxon truly, genuinely believes that Labour would bankrupt the country, it’s utterly unconscionable to in any way make it likelier for the left to get in. 

I’ve been screaming to the rafters for months about how easy it is to go back and check that between 1946 and 2020, the Labour-Green left bloc never won a majority of the public and can never win an MMP election on their own. While there are other variables like Māori seat overhangs and Opportunity, as it currently stands, it would be a dereliction of duty for any good conservative leading a nation that usually elects National to introduce a less proportional system.

Number two: I’ve repeatedly argued National is positioned to hold up well in the electorate vote under the current system. Any electoral reform that strips away a party vote and makes control of the government dependent on electorates kills that. Swing voters who would have electorate voted National and party voted Labour instead vote for the Labour candidate, and loads more National candidates would go under across the country, losing the party lots more talent. 

Instead, the talents that National would attract would be the out-there thinkers who currently gravitate to parties like ACT, because they know they have a good shot at getting into Parliament and getting stuff done. Neuter the minor parties and the David Seymours of the future won’t stop showing up to argue with you - they’ll just infiltrate the National Party and have it out with you around the cabinet table. This is exactly how the Rogernomes commanded the agenda of the Fourth Labour Government! Does he want to give his party its own generation of ideological crisis?

If Luxon wants to make the case for a system that would concentrate more power in the hands of two men - him and Chris Hipkins - I’d be chuffed. You couldn’t pick two better poster boys for keeping the system we have right now. MMP is such a rare privilege of a system, and 58% of voters affirmed that in 2011. Luxon has come with no new arguments to change that, only his mumbled frustrations. Unlike our FPTP sisters over in Britain, I suggest we don’t waste our time trying to overturn a settled referendum, and move on to what we can change today.