By Janika Ter Ellen
Come November, voters will choose who will govern our country for the next three years. But there's another choice New Zealanders will be asked to make and it's one that's more enduring and arguably more important.
Alongside the general election will be a referendum on whether we keep mixed-member proportional (MMP) as our voting system or change it to one of four other options.
The referendum is a National Party election promise and it comes eighteen years after MMP was narrowly voted in.The chance to change it is just four months away.
There are five systems to choose from in the referendum:
- The MMP system has 70 electorate MPs, and 50 MPs who are selected through party lists. Parties who win one electorate, or get 5-percent of the party vote get in to Parliament and, with some exceptions, they get the number of seats equivalent to their share of the party vote.
- The single transferrable vote system has no list MPs and each large electorate can have more than one MP. Voters rank candidates in preferential order, so if a candidate doesn’t get the required number of votes as a first choice, they can receive more votes as a second or third choice.
- First-past-the-post (FPP), which is the system New Zealand used up until 1993, means voters get only one vote, an electorate vote. There are 120 electorates with one MP for each, and there are no list MPs.
- The preferential voting (PV) system also has one MP per electorate with no list MPs. Voters rank their preferences and if their first choices are eliminated, they can still get a say with their second or third choices.
- The supplementary member (SM) system has 90 electorate MPs and 30 list MPs but unlike MMP, party votes only matter in the 30 list seats and doesn't determine the share of all the seats in parliament, as in MMP.
The campaign to keep MMP is headed by Tertiary Education Union president Sandra Grey who says “the key thing is the idea of fairness”.
“The idea that each of us gets to cast our vote for the party we want to see in parliament, and provided they cross the threshold, those parties will be there.”
The campaign against MMP, ‘Vote for Change’, is fronted by lawyer Jordan Williams but they have not chosen which alternative to MMP they support but it will be either FPP, PV or SM.
It has been a rocky start for the group with former-Waitakere Mayor Bob Harvey quitting after allegations another member was involved with a white supremacist group.
Mr Williams says he’s against MMP because “you can’t kick the rascals out”.
“I believe that politicians and democracy is about accountability, not about representation. Democracy is not the best at picking the best leaders of a society but the reason why democracy works and the reason why democracy is the best system is because it allows the people to kick the rascals out”.
Political parties have been slow to pick sides and the Green Party are the only ones willing to put their support behind a system, being MMP.
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