We had a great debate on the MMP remit today. The most challenging part of the debate was over the proposal to reduce the size of electorates, resulting in fewer List MPs. Some say that this will be bad for diversity and proportionality. I am told that the Greens think it will leave them with one MP. Let me make it clear that none of the smaller parties will lose any MPs as a result of this proposal, as overall proportionality would still be retained – unlike the Supplementary Member system being proposed by the government. As long as we retain overall proportionality then it isn’t a problem.
The remit we passed today says Labour should initiate the debate on improving MMP and so we should – otherwise the government will run a “for or against” referendum designed to engineer a vote against MMP by highlighting its shortcomings, while denying the public a chance to fix some of the faults in the system. None of us can pretend the current system is perfect – how could you argue that, when NZ First has no MPs in Parliament despite winning more Party Votes than the ACT Party, which has 5 MPs simply because Rodney Hide won Epsom? Delegates at the conference argued that if we were going to fix this “coat-tails” anomaly, then we should reduce the threshold from 5% to 4% in line with the original Royal Commission report. This is not clear-cut, but the public should be asked to reflect on what happened at the last election and also on the current threshold keeping the Christian Heritage Party led by Graham Capill out of Parliament in 1996 (4.3%).
I have taken a very positive message from the debate about the idea of smaller electorates and fewer List MPs. The truth is that the Party Lists have made a real difference to Parliament, especially in terms of diversity and representation for constituencies that are not geographic. There are more women in Parliament, more Maori, Pacifica & ethnic MPs, and there are more openly gay and lesbian MPs as well. Delegates expressed concern that this diversity might be lost with fewer List MPs. The challenge is for all parties to step up to the plate in terms of selecting constituency candidates. Labour does very well in this regard – two of our Pacifica MPs are electorate MPs and one of our gay MPs is too – and the other two will be in the future. Labour has always contributed far more women to Parliament than National well before MMP came along. So I don’t fear this shift in emphasis – electorate vs list – some of the electorates are simply too large and constituents should have no trouble accessing their MP when they need to.
I believe as MPs we have to set aside our personal interests in this debate, and ensure that all these issues are put on the table, so the public has a genuine say about the future of our electoral system. I don’t want to go back to a two Party system with elections won or lost on a handful of votes in a tiny number of marginal seats, because that’s what Supplementary Member is – First Past the Post with a winner’s bonus!
This referendum must not be allowed to proceed as a “for and against” vote. The option of debating some of MMP’s features must be part of the process or it will lack integrity.
I think it’s really good that Labour is taking up the challenge to suggest improvements to MMP. It of course begs the question why Labour didn’t suggest any improvements over the nine years that it was in government and had the power to influence things, which I think they should have done rather than veto any chance of a referendum on the subject.
Yet again there seems to be a disconnect between what Labour are asking take place now and the silence over why they didn’t do it before, but it’s nice to see you finally talking about it. I think if you were a party with fresher faces you might be able to get away with saying different things and coming up with new ideas that the old guard didn’t raise when they were in government. In that respect I think your party’s position is compromised by having so many of the old guard still there, Ms Dalziel.
We still haven’t got any MPs who identify as disabled. Disgraceful really as disabled people are 20% of the population. Was there any discussion about how Labour could remedy this huge gap? A candidate who was blind or who used a wheelchair, for example, would need extra support to run an electorate campaign.
Let me make it clear that none of the smaller parties will lose any MPs as a result of this proposal
In light of this , can someone tell me how so? The Greens will lose some list MPs should the numberof LIst MPs drop – with the unlikelihood of getting them back as electorate MPs.
Better to reduce the threshold below 4%, not the number of list MPs in a 120 MP parliament. Finally you claim that the 4% threshold was in line with the RC report. That report also recommended a nil threshold for Maori parties. Had that occurred, the Mana Maori party would have got representation from 1996-2005, as would Mauri Pacific in 1999, no doubt at the expense of National, and perhaps the Greens..
I’m all for disabled rights, but I don’t think that there should be MPs with disabilities put there just to fill a hole in the types of people who make up parliament. If a person with a disability ran in my electorate and was the best person in my mind for the job then I would vote for that person and want to see that person have a political career.
I think society is slowly improving with regards to helping people with disabilties have careers. I think that there is a long way to go – both with obvious disabilties and invisible ones.
I’ve met many great people with disabilties and I have met horrible people with disabilties. I do think that in the future that it would be nice to see people with disabilties running for parliament, but as a natural desire to enter politics and not just for the sake of seeking out a person just so that the party has someone with a disability.
If a person with a disabiltiy came forward on their own to enter politics then I would hope that they would receive the appropriate support to enable them to do this.
Dave: The Greens will lose some list MPs should the numberof LIst MPs drop
No they won’t. Their entitlement will be unchanged. What will happen is that the large parties will win more electorates, and thus get fewer list seats themselves.
And that’s the real problem. With the cube rule and a high ratio of electorates to list seats, you don’t have to go very far before you get into permanent overhangs for the largest party. Thanks to the way the number of electorates grows, we’d get there naturally anyway; Labour is proposing to bring that forward. In short, they are suggesting “fixing” MMP by breaking it. And the fact that this will advantage them invites a certain level of cynicism (which is increased when you remember that they never liked it in the first place and we had to force it down their throats…)
Oh – and with fewer list seats, all that diversity Lianne is so proud of would disappear in favour of a tide of dead white males. Way to go, guys.
Basically, this is not a solution. If you want to fix MMP, then you don’t do it by undermining proportionality, delegitimising list MPs, and destroying the advantages it has given us.
Moi- There have been several disabled people keen to participate in the last few years. A couple I know about got low unwinnable list placings. What I like about MMP is that parties could give good disabled candidates high list placings. The LP has done it with other minority groups. Just saying anyone can stand for a seat does not not make for an equal playing field – it’s an ablist society out there (also sexist, racist and homophobic).
Hilary – I agree with you that there is a lot of discrimination against people with disabilties who are ready and willing to take on responsibility. A high calibre person with a disabiltiy should get a shot at a good list placing and not be prevented from doing anything due to disabiltiy. I too wish that disability didn’t matter and that a person who was good could be judged in the same way as a healthy person.
I guess I have a problem with tokenism and somebody getting preferential treatment / list placement just because they have a disabiltiy. I detest the opposite of this where a talented person is overlooked or held back because all people can see is the disabiltiy and I don’t think that a disabiltiy should be an acceptable reason for keeping someone low on a party list.
But I also think that political parties should have inclusive cultures and be willing to provide support to people with disabilties who do want to further themselves.
@Tim Ellis – when I heard John Key announce he was going to hold a referendum ‘for or against’ MMP, I discussed it with my local Labour electorate committee and we decided to submit a remit to our regional conference to ensure that Labour was part of the debate around how that referendum would be held. We knew that there were aspects of MMP that weren’t popular and that the opponents of MMP would use those features to discredit it and engineer a vote against it. We felt that the people should at least have the option of addressing the issues they were concerned about. This remit formed the basis for the remit that was debated and carried on the floor of conference today. If there is going to be a referendum then these issues need to be debated. You can call me the old guard all you like, but I have always supported and advocated for proportional representation. I do not want New Zealanders conned into thinking Supplementary Member is proportional representation – it is not.
@Hilary – there are many MPs who have disabilities – whether they choose to promote this aspect of themselves, or indeed disclose it, is a matter entirely for them. Disability should not be a barrier to becoming a political representative and there may be aspects of Parliament that would have to change depending on the nature of the disability.
@Idiot Savant – at 80-40 there is no overhang on the calculations I have seen – on 90-30 a National or Labour overhang would still only be occasional, with the exceptional worst case scenario being something like the 2002 result when a very unpopular National leader saw the Nats staying home rather than voting. This “fix” is not designed to do anything other than reduce the size of increasingly large electorates and see the list more as the top up it was originally designed to be. Anyway it’s just an option to put to people for discussion – something they are denied by the proposed referendum saying Yes or No!
Disability is political. It’s like feminism. Having women MPs does not automatically make things better for women (look at Kate Wilkinson slashing pay equity.) We need disabled MPs who are advocates for disability rights and role models for other disabled people.
I’d suggest that if you want to decrease the size of electorates, you should increase the size of Parliament. We’re going to have to do that anyway to stop proportionality from eroding…
Lianne: If you are advocating for proportional representation, why are you proposing a suggestion that would lead to a non-proportional system as a possible improvement?
..” less proportional”
I voted for the removal of Remit 14(a), and I wish Andrew had stopped at the body count, which was marginally ahead for removal of (a), rather than proceed to the card count.
We are, over time, moving back towards a FPP system. As the number of electorates grows every five years and the number of list seats decreases, we will eventually end up with a situation of 120 electorates and no list MPs. That situation needs to be addressed.
[...] Dalziel and
One question: what happens if the minor parties combined get more than 33% of the vote, entitling them to more than 40 seats?
Looking at past election results – 1996 and 2002 – this is not beyond the bounds of possibility. So, what happens?
I/S – that’s called overhang.
National and Labour would have, say, 78 electorate seats between them, but only be entitled to 70 seats from their party votes. There would be 8 overhang.
Just like when the M?ori Party got 5 electorate seats, but was only entitled to 3 seats from their party votes. We have two extra list MPs in the present Parliament because of overhang of a small party, there’s no reason why we wouldn’t have extra list MPs because of overhang caused by larger parties.
I am, of course, assuming we’re getting more electorate MPs by increasing the number in the South Island from it’s current 16. At the last boundary change following the census, we might have set the number at 18 SI seats, which would have meant 53 NI seats, and 8 M?ori seats (79 total).
You could of course change the law to something vastly different. I’m not sure what Labour are actually considering. I suspect they aren’t either. Perhaps the suggestion would be 80 seats, apportioned between NI, SI, and M?ori after each census/M?ori option, like House seats are between states in the United States…
that’s called overhang.
Yes, and its a bad thing, something we should design to minimise, not promote.
But then, I am not an MP of a large party who would benefit from it (as I said: the proposal invites cynicism)
@Dave:
Your comment regarding Mana Maori caught my eye, so I ran the Sainte-Laguë method on the election results 1996–2002 with MM exempted from the threshold: they still didn’t get enough votes to be allocated any seats.
(If you think about it, something like this—a party crossing its threshold, but not getting all, or in this case, any, of the seats that this might imply—has to be possible. Otherwise there’d be a massive proliferation of tiny parties that would utterly swamp Parliament.)
As to the main point of the post and I/S’s comment: what’s wrong with increasing the number of electorates and increasing the number of list seats in proportion? Proportionality is preserved, and local MPs can better handle their smaller electorates.
Ah. Sorry. My browser didn’t show several interevening comments, and I/S made the point I was trying to. My bad.
@BK, um. yes, correct, my bad. Oops. Nearly as bad as suggesting a substantial decrease of list seats ( by reducing the size of electorates, increasing their number) with the outcome that your party could benefit via an electorate seat overhang. Electoral reform that leads to overhang should be rejected outright.
A parliament of 150 would be the easiest way to resolve this with 75 electoral seats, if you do want to retain the electorate anachronism. Capping the number of MPs at 120 with a ever rising population is the real problem here; allow the numbers to rise with population growth. Shifting the share of electorate seats anywhere past 60% gets distortionary with a strong probability of an over hang for the main party with no possibility of new blood via the party list. Should this not set off alarm bells where new blood for the party is so important for long term political dominance?
Thank you to you all. It is through this thread that I rest my case. We must have the opportunity to debate these issues. Those of us who are interested in politics or have an interest in politics should demand that all these issues be put on the table for debate – even the conservative Press had a headline this weekend “Any referendum on MMP should only follow a thorough review”. After identifying the strengths of MMP, including fairer representation for minor parties; and gender & ethnic diversity; the editorial says that if MMP gets the thumbs down, the Supplementary Member system is a “veneer”, as only a minority of seats would be allocated proportionately, strengthening the position of the two major parties. The Press suggests fine tuning MMP including the controversial area of list MPs. I want electorates reduced in size because some of the provincial seats are far too difficult to manage in size. This has the flow on effect to the number of List MPs – a debate would enable all the issues about what they bring to Parliament be placed on the table. What is frustrating is that I have always argued that there is a need to represent constituencies that are not geographic – I found I could not do that as a List MP but others do it well – and some have used it as a stepping stone to an electorate seat (e.g. Luamanuvao Winnie Laban and Hon Pansy Wong). But we have failed to win the hearts and minds of the public who see people elected to Parliament who have failed to win the seat they stood for – I have always argued that this is a benefit of MMP – (FPP guarantees that loss no matter how popular the local MP is against a Party swing to the other side – Nick Smith would not be an MP under FPP). If we don’t have the discussion about this, the lack of public understanding will guarantee the demise of proportional representation altogether and this thread will have been a waste of time.
Interesting comments Ms Dalziel. I was a bit puzzled by your comment:
If we don’t have the discussion about this, the lack of public understanding will guarantee the demise of proportional representation altogether and this thread will have been a waste of time.
If you’re concerned about “lack of public understanding”, then you could always try and educate people, rather than pandering to that ignorance.
I think you’ve overstated the annoyance – voters aren’t annoyed that people who don’t win the electorate seat they stand for get into Parliament on the list, they are annoyed that some people who were electorate MPs can be returned to Parliament despite losing in the electorate they once held.
People know that many MPs run in seats where they’re just making up the numbers – Chris Finlayson was not going to win Mana or Rongotai, and Maryan Street was never going to win Taranaki King-Country or Nelson. This doesn’t annoy them all that much. The annoyance is really about MPs like (not really picking on someone) Diane Yates – who was MP for Hamilton East, but lost it in 2005 to come back on the list.
But even then, I think the annoyance is more at the quality of MPs, rather than anything else. People might not like Winston Peters, but that he got in after losing Tauranga in 2005 because his party got 130,000 votes wasn’t that big a problem for people.
The alternative – forbidding people running in both electorates and on the list – is fraught with problems like this. If Winston wants to run in Tauranga, there shouldn’t be too much problem with his still getting in because he gets people all around the country to vote for him, even though he fell a few hundred votes short of defeating Bob Clarkson.
Those are good points Mr Edgeler. I don’t think you can legislate for this sort of thing, like having for example Ms Tizard return after she was dumped by her electorate after holding Auckland Central for so long.
There is an opportunity in my view for parties to self-regulate. Parties should be able to identify electorate MPs who might be vulnerable to losing their electorates, and giving them clear signals that the List won’t protect them if they lose their seat.
I don’t think that the return of MPs who have been turned out by their electorate seat on the party list is that big a deal.
One, if the MP was turned out by the electorate, but retained by the party, there are still a large number of people who chose to give that person a mandate, via the party vote. If the national public are disappointed to see that person back on the list, then the party as a whole will get hammered the following election.
It is up to the individual parties to self-regulate, and the parties know the public will hold them to account.
MMP is still more democratic than FPP, I worry we are going to lose the baby with the bathwater on this issue.
The other anomaly happened in Epsom in 2005 when Rodney Hide started saying that if they elected him they would get two for the price of one. They could have both he and Richard Worth in parliament.
National voters sensing the need to maximise the right vote accepted this and voted him in. As a result we now have Boscawen, Roy, Douglas and Hide all in parliament even though their party enjoys barely 1-2% support. This was all as a result of the strategic decisions of a few thousand Epsom Nat voters.
Hence the case for abolishing the 5% threshold.
Graeme’s comments about the SI quota mechanism are accurate -they’re exactly where we’ve focussed our calculations. I think we should be open to looking at a SI quota of 18-20, and let those calculations flow through.
As for I/S’s concerns about the slow errosion of the ration of list MPs, perhaps the best way to fix that is to change the way we calculate the size of the House, so that it increases from 120 to ensure that list seats are always 1/3 of the total proportion of the House heading into an election.
As for the notion that this simply enables the election of grumpy white men, I think that’s plainly false.
Even in 2008 when the tide was against Labour; more electorates (ie smaller electorates) would have likely seen Lynne Pillay, Carol Beaumont, Moana Mackey, Maryann Street, and Lesley Soper all stand much stronger chances of winning electorates.
I don’t think it’s a particularly big deal either. I just think that even those who are annoyed aren’t as annoyed as Lianne suggested.
Absolutely. And Labour could promise this at the next election. Capitalise on the anti-zombie vote
What puzzles me is why Labour did not back the change to MMP in the first place, yet has now changed its tune. All the Liberal columnists such as Paul Holmes and John Armstrong are coming out for MMP, but they never mention the problem with the list MP’s, or the fact that FPP delivered a government that reflected the majority of voter will. I don’t agree with Mr Holmes that we need to move on with the issue, at least not till the referndum (binding?..) is held. Even if MMP gets to stay, the electorate in general is entitled to another say, not just those in Parliament, surely? I would have thought our Press was much more liberal than conservative, especially the Dom Post and the Herald.
James 20 SI seats is getting pretty high for a 120 seat House – you’re looking at 88 electorates on current numbers, and that’s only going to rise.
Even 80 electorates would be problematic. You could get a situation where a Party leader decides to be list only (perhaps because we change the rules about dual standing?) and then wins the election and doesn’t get to be PM. If the 2002 election had been 80/40, Labour would have gotten no list MPs. If Helen had been list-only, she’d have been out of Parliament – despite a crushing electoral defeat of National.
Graeme,
Agree that 20 is at the upper end. I was just trying to put an upper limit on it for debate.
Helen was of course an electorate MP and with smaller electorates Michael Cullen would probably have stayed so too.
Didnt Cullen drop his Dunedin electorate because he moved to Napier for family reasons
Then again he could have done a ‘Blinglish’ and been an electorate MP ‘in name only’ -EMPINO
Interesting and very relevant points, Ghost. I guess the final verdict on the matter is Mr English’s electorate. They obviously think highly enough of him and see him often enough to give him a 15,000 vote majority just a year ago. Somewhat higher than any Labour MP has in their electorate I believe.
Ghost – yes he did, but in this hypothetical past he could have sought selection there instead if he had wanted to.
EDIT to last post:
If we maintain MMP rather than going to full proportional then set the number of electorates @ #Voters/30k and have it so that the number of list seats equals the number of electorate seats (I’d suggest adjustments every two census). This is most likely to maintain proportionality while keeping the electorates of a size that the MPs can more easily represent.
Full proportionality is still the best option.
It’s called living and learning. Something those of a conservative bent seem dead set against.
The problem isn’t with the list MPs but with the electorate MPs. List MPs are far more accountable to the public than electorate MPs. FPP doesn’t deliver a government that represents a majority of the voters. In fact, it has a tendency to deliver a government that represents a minority of voters which is why we got rid of it in the first place.
Clutha/Southland is a safe National seat. National could put Noddy (Yes, I’m talking about the toy) in there and he’d get elected with a 15k majority. That’s just another major issue with geographically defined seats – gerrymandering.
Hello Tanya
“What puzzles me is why Labour did not back the change to MMP in the first place, yet has now changed its tune.”
I wouldn’t presume to comment for the Labour party, but when interviewed on his leaving parliament, Speaker Jonathon Hunt stated that he opposed MMP to begin with, then changed his mind because he felt it was working.
Politicians who pay attention to events and change their positions when they decide they were in the wrong is a positive sign.
Hi Tim Ellis
For a fair verdict on Bill English, perhaps a close look at his majority would be valuable, but don’t expect him to lose that seat. Clutha-Southland has been National (and English’s) since its formation, and the electorate before Clutha-Southland, Wallace, was National’s since the first election National stood in – 1938.
I don’t want to say that the National party could stand a concrete block in Clutha-Southland and it would be returned by the electorate… but it is one of those party based ‘MP for life’ electoral seats.
I think the more that we look at it, the more it becomes obvious that it’s difficult to increase the number of electorates significantly and maintain proportionality without increasing the number of MPs. The longer you leave that the harder it will do, because the larger the number of MPs you will have to increase in the Parliament.
That strikes me politically as the equivalent of cat-sick.
@Tim Ellis – Nick Smith was elected in 1990 as the MP for Tasman – under MMP Tasman was incorporated into Nelson & the West Coast. Nick knew he couldn’t win West Coast/Tasman, so he stood for Nelson, where Labour won the Party vote and Nick beat the Labour candidate, who had held the seat for 2 terms. The people of Nelson knew they could split their votes – something that could not be done under FPP.
Have to board my plane, so I will return to this later. Although I will quickly say that the Labour caucus did not have a view on MMP – it was all decided on referendum. Tim Barnett, before he was an MP, (opposed to MMP) and I (in favour of MMP) used to do meetings around Christchurch to put both cases. It caused no problem within our caucus that several of us were for MMP and several were opposed (including the leadership).
Interesting.
Tanya, FPP was viewed as a problem for precisely the opposite reason. The concern is around the “popular” vote which is to say you can win more than half the seats in Parliament and thus govern, but with less than half the total vote. This is a distortion and I think there was an election where one party won about 34% of the total vote but cleverly targetted winning seats by virtue of having the highest polling candidates (you only need to poll highest, but the majority of the electorate may vote for someone else).
MMP is effective in so far as it is “representative” – balancing up the distortion of FPP electorate race, anomalies aside it does have the effect of being too pure. Personally, I’d rather see Single Transferable Voting for our electorates which solves the FPP problem of the popular vote, but that isn’t to say you can’t still operate a plural voting system, it does however become more complex.
I think James Caygill is right, 1/3 remaining as a proportional list representation – depending on the size of the voting population – with a greater number of smaller electorates in a supplementary member style system. I also think it’s time we either enshrine the Maori Option, or drop it all together. Depending on your view of the world, both approaches have benefits, it’s just a matter of whether you’re an electoral purist or not.
Hi Kaine T
“I think there was an election where one party won about 34% of the total vote”
I think you may mean either the 1993 election, where Jim Bolger lead the National Party to a dominate parliamentary majority based on only 35.05% of the vote.
Hi Tanya
I have to revisit your earlier comment.
“… or the fact that FPP delivered a government that reflected the majority of voter will.”
I completely disagree that this was the case. If it was true then the MMP wouldn’t have won out in two referendums.
I’m just going to do the ‘last word’ on this thread. My point is that we cannot have a ‘for/against’ referendum on MMP without assessing all aspects of MMP first. If we don’t do that then all the pet hates about MMP will be wheeled out by Mr Shirtcliff and the usual suspects as a reason to vote against it. Then the 2011 election campaign becomes a sideshow to the debate about the integrity of the referendum. I don’t mind having the referendum with the election as long as it honestly puts the options – even the most conservative editorials are saying ‘don’t throw the baby out with the bath water’ – which means there must be a review of MMP before the ‘for/against’ referendum is held, because it may well be that some tidying up would satisfy the majority of the population. Who knows? Well actually no-one will unless we have the debate.
This post cannot be taken seriously as a defence of democracy. Winston and Christian Heritage are in the same position yet Winston is obviously favoured as a preferred Labour coalition partner just as he was at the last election. Act of course is not favoured, no surprise but this is purporting to be about democracy, not political ideology. It’s like 2005 all over again. Democracy delivered all those election results.
MMP should simply be recognised for what it is, a system that has largely worked to the benefit of flaky small parties. All those people that you talked about, they could have been stood in safe seats under FPP and elected that way. It is just the passage of time and the selection of more diverse candidates that has brought them into Parliament, not MMP.
MMP has not brought any radical change in the way Parliament works. All the small parties that have gained from it are flaky as. Their influence is far out of proportion to their credibility. MMP is just an electoral system primarily to benefit politicians, not the electorate. There has not been any behavioural improvement to speak of in Parliament. Ultimately greater accountability to the electorate will require more radical measures than a bit of tidying up. When I see the railing against a referendum here I remember the contradiction with the calls for one in Auckland.
So there are no MPs who identify as disabled. Auckland doesn’t get an Asian committee or a Pacifica Committee either. Good call, the government knows it is only a short step from there to reserved Asian or Pacifica seats on the Auckland council, then logically there will have to be reserved Pakeha seats as well. Where does it end?
” What puzzles me is why Labour did not back the change to MMP in the first place, yet has now changed its tune.
It’s called living and learning. Something those of a conservative bent seem dead set against.”
It’s called the discovery that MMP has not resulted in as much of a restriction on govermnment or Parliament as was first thought.
The historical opposition of the major parties to MMP is the perception that the nature of it would act as a check on their powers, and having to negotiate and form coalitions etc. As time went on there has not proven to be much drag at all. Parliament has still been able to push through deeply unpopular laws with a few baubles etc. That simply raises the obvious point that all the handwringing and pious pretensions about how Parliament is elected, is irrelevant if the way its business is conducted remains largely unchanged. What matters is that Parliament should be seeking a mandate much more often than every three years, for major policies or bills that are brought before the house, to the extent that the public have a say in a way that is binding on the House.
The above is a radical change to the Westminster system, which itself is deeply flawed as it starts from the notion that the Sovereign decided to hand over some powers to the people, they would decide how much they wanted to give over and the systen would always be tilted in favour of the monarch or the government. As such the Cabinet and the ruling party hold all the cards regardless.
Consider that the occupation of politician in NZ as well as many other countries is near the bottom of the heap in terms of public trust and clearly there is a serious problem, we are having this debate about tinkering with the way that Parliament is elected but this is a sideshow. I have no doubt that vested interests that benefit from the current system want to maintain the status quo and won’t consider much more radical reforms, however I think the debate should go far beyond the system used to elect MPs to Parliament.
Swampy – there are and have been MPs who identify as disabled.
In Margaret Wilson’s valedictory speech, she noted: