Mike's Minute: Is this MMP working properly?

The Mike Hosking Breakfast

The Treaty Principles Bill gets debated this week, and then off it goes to the committee that will hear a lot of fear mongering and whinging about how it is the end of the world.

After that it will come back to Parliament, a vote will be had, it won't get the numbers, and it will be dead.

This is unusual as Governments normally put bills in they know they are going to pass.

Here is why it ties into Trump's victory last week:

Trump won because he is the repository for grievance. If you don’t like the left you vote for what's not the left, because you only have a choice of two.

Under MMP you have more choices. We have taken a lot of time to work that out, but as MMP matures we are reaching a place where more parties will establish themselves as ongoing contributors to the system, as opposed to being seen as fringe and on the verge of survival.

This Government will be especially helpful if it performs well as a group, gets re-elected and possibly goes for a third term, because it will show three parties can coalesce and agree to disagree, while remaining separate and independent.

The Greens have already arrived at this place. They are a permanent fixture on the landscape, and they don’t dabble with 5%.

The point here is, as a result, the big parties will shed support. The days of National being 45%-ish are gone because parties like ACT and New Zealand First look to head towards 10%, if not more.

The Treaty bill might well be ACT's ride to permanence.

The same way Trump hoovered up blacks and Hispanics who were sick of being treated like a block and not individuals, ACT could hoover up New Zealanders sick of race-based policy.

If National don’t, or won't deal to it, ACT can.

In an MMP environment Trump would not have stood a chance. But their system is less sophisticated than ours.

Choice is good. It gets over-represented in jurisdictions where the threshold is too low because you end up with single issue nutters. But at 5% it looks like we have picked it right because you can be small without being too fringe.

Hopefully ACT and New Zealand First break the MMP hoodoo where small parties vanish in Government because there are enough specific issues and enough electoral confidence for parties to stake clams and build support.

Big parties no longer have to be everything to everyone.

If this is an emerging trend, MMP will have properly arrived, and we will all be better off for it.

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