Lessons to be learned from New Zealand’s electoral system

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

We often fear what we do not know, and most Australians struggle to understand New Zealand’s unique electoral system.

Mixed-member proportional representation operates as a conjoined system that incorporates elements of our lower and upper house systems. It has a list-based party ticket that allocates seats according to the nationwide total votes for political parties, and there are individual member electorates, just as there are for our House of Representatives.

However, unlike our bicameral parliament where the two elec­toral systems operate side-by-side, creating representatives for two separate chambers, New Zealand has a unicameral parliament. The two systems elect members to the one chamber, not two.

It is designed to create democratic buy-in for minor parties, unlike the Australian system, which gives minor parties the occasional opportunity to hold the balance of power in the house of government but more often does so in the Senate, which is designed merely to act as a check and balance on the lower house.

Unicameral parliaments often suffer from a narrow political culture, which can stifle the opportunities for minor parties to have an influence on the body politic, but not when the MMP system is in operation, and therefore not in New Zealand.

Queensland has Australia’s only unicameral parliament and minor parties rarely secure representation in the sunshine state. As fate would have it, however, One Nation is looking as though it will defy that tradition for a second time in 20 years when Queenslanders go to the polls.

Often minor parties don’t draw their support from geographically clumped areas. Regionally based parties have long been an exception to this rule and, increasingly, inner-city electorates also are becoming an exception, as their political complexion turns Green.

The MMP system means minor parties can compete in individual member-based electorates against the major parties but they also can secure representation in the house of government via a ­nationwide list system.

It’s an inclusive electoral system for a mature country. Unlike in Australia, where increasingly activist minor parties in the Senate can pick and choose the issues on which they support a government, in New Zealand coalitions often need to be built to form governments. As such, minor parties are drawn into the government of the day because they reside in the house of government, and they learn not to simply snipe from the sidelines.

The system also can prevent major parties from lurching too far left or right to appeal to their base. When compromises have to be made with other political parties, governments inevitably broaden.

This week the New Zealand system saw Labour return to power after years in the political wilderness, courtesy of kingmaker Winston Peters of New Zealand First throwing his support behind Jacinda Ardern. Labour was already in a loose coalition with the Greens, which gave it 54 seats in total compared with Bill English’s Nationals total of 56.

But Australians, to the extent they look across the ditch, have struggled to comprehend how a major party that wins 44.4 per cent of the nationwide vote compared with a Labour share of just 36.9 per cent (topped up by the 6.3 per cent Greens vote) doesn’t get to form government.

The answer is simple: it’s the electoral system, stupid. Electoral systems can deliver wildly divergent results.

In my Australian politics unit I enjoy the process of explaining to students that different electoral systems could have delivered entirely different results across almost all Australian elections, stretching as far back as World War II.

Even winning a majority of the primary vote doesn’t guarantee victory in our system. In fact, only once has an Australian major party won a majority of the primary vote since World War II, and that was the Labor Party in 1954. It lost the election anyway.

Is it time for Australia to take another look at our electoral system? Perhaps it should look across the ditch when doing so. Tony Abbott has added a valuable contribution to the reform debate by spruiking for changes to the powers of the Senate. Why not look at wholesale electoral reform, perhaps embracing a model similar to New Zealand’s?

New Zealand has been shaming Australia for years now. As a country, it doesn’t enjoy the ­national resources advantages we do. Despite that, its economy is doing better than ours.

It showed us how to have a serious debate on tax reform when it kept politics out of the debate on increasing the GST. The National Broadband Network in this country has become an unmitigated failure and a political football; in New Zealand internet speeds are nearly double ours and access is far more readily available. And a conservative government across the ditch legalised same-sex marriage years ago, and managed to do so without needing to institute gay exceptionalism via a one-off postal survey.

It will be interesting to see if the election of Ardern represents a continuation of New Zealand punching above its weight or the moment it succumbs to the temptations of personality politics over substance.

English was the economic architect of much of New Zealand’s prosperity during John Key’s period as prime minister. But the largely untested 37-year-old Ardern parachuted into the Labour leadership just ahead of the election and used her personality and likability to bring her party back from the dead.

The thinking internally was that she needed to get Labour close enough to strike next time. Instead she now has the reins of power in a somewhat unwieldy coalition with the Greens and New Zealand First. The ideological threads are unclear, and experience on the frontbench is limited after such a long period of Nationals rule.

It will be a testing time for the new government, and as a cynical Australian it’s hard not to see some parallels with when a popular Kevin Rudd beat an experienced and well-credentialed John Howard. That was the beginning of the end of a long run of quality governance in this country.

Hopefully New Zealand doesn’t suffer the same fate. As a fan of the electoral system that threw up this surprise, I’d hate to see it blamed for what happens next if Labour’s coalition doesn’t govern effectively.

Peter van Onselen is a professor at the University of Western Australia and Sky News presenter.