How “New” Is Our Democracy?

A Living Democracy - But Not A Tyranny Of The Majority: Wellington voters gather outside The Evening Post newspaper offices to see the results of the 1931 General Election posted.

The face of New Zealand and democracy has changed dramatically in the past few years and we need to reflect New Zealand’s new identity and democracy in our main media entities.

Willie Jackson, NZ Herald, 5 July 2022.

HAS NEW ZEALAND’S DEMOCRACY really “changed dramatically” in the past few years? I suppose it all depends on how you define “democracy”, “dramatically” and “the past few years”. Let’s start from there, and then work on to explore the motivation behind such a bold political assertion.

There are very few countries in the world that can boast a continuous democracy as old as New Zealand’s. Our population became fully enfranchised in 1893 when the Liberal Government extended voting rights to women. The United States would not reach that democratic milestone until 1920, and women would not be fully enfranchised in the United Kingdom until 1930. If one of the key indicators of a democratic nation is the right of its people to vote in fair and regular elections, then New Zealand can hold its head high.

Another feature of a working democratic system is whether the will of the majority of voters is reflected in the character and composition of their government. In this regard, New Zealand’s record is less exemplary. Since the acquisition of self-government in 1852, New Zealand has experimented with a number of electoral systems.

The “Two Round System”, for example, pitted the two highest polling candidates of an initial open round of voting against each other in a second, run-off, ballot. It was designed to ensure that, ultimately, a Member of Parliament represented a true majority of the electors. It lasted from 1908 until 1914. Another, the so-called “Country Quota”, weighted the votes of electors living in rural areas more heavily than those of urban voters. This blatantly anti-socialist measure lasted from 1881 until 1945!

Underpinning both of these measures, however, was the electoral system known as “First-Past-The-Post (FPP). To win an FPP election it was necessary for a candidate to win more votes than any of his/her rivals. Not more than all the votes of his/her competitors combined, you understand, only a simple plurality. The candidate with the most votes (which may, or may not, have constituted a majority of the votes) won.

Obviously, FPP can easily lead to a situation in which the governing party is able to win a majority of parliamentary seats with considerably fewer than half of the votes cast. In an election where three or four parties of roughly equal strength are seeking the electors’ support, the outcome is not Majority Rule, but the rule of the most popular minority. Since it is clearly unhelpful, in terms of preserving political legitimacy, to have a clear majority of voters feeling unrepresented, the grim arithmetical logic of FPP drives the political class inexorably towards a rigid two-party system.

In the 1920s and early-1930s, New Zealand voters had three major parties to choose from: the Reform Party, the Liberal (later the United) Party, and the Labour Party. In no election between 1919 and 1938 did any single political party ever secure more than half the votes cast. FPP notwithstanding, however, New Zealand only boasted a genuine two-party system for five elections (1938, 1943, 1946, 1949, 1951) The Labour/National duopoly was broken in 1954 with the advent of the Social Credit Political League. It would take until 2020 for a single New Zealand political party to, once again, secure more than half of the popular vote.

The switch from FPP to Mixed Member Proportional Representation (MMP) in 1996 was certainly the most dramatic change to New Zealand’s democratic machinery since the National Party abolished the Legislative Council – New Zealand’s unelected (and largely decorative) Upper House of Parliament – in 1950.

New Zealanders voted for MMP in response to what was widely perceived as a lack of democratic political agency. With Labour and National both committed to neoliberal economic and social policies, many New Zealanders felt politically disenfranchised. Voters dreamed of electing Parliaments in which heterogeneous assemblages of genuine representatives would enable the formation of governments much more closely attuned to the people’s will.

Their hopes were not fulfilled. MMP certainly allowed political parties to select candidates more reflective of the gender, ethnicity and sexual-preference makeup of the New Zealand population, but the House of Representatives continued to be dominated by National and Labour. Those smaller parties that did manage to make it into Parliament dutifully lined-up with one or other of the two major parties in coalitions that only very rarely produced anything even remotely challenging of the neoliberal status quo.

Regardless of the drama, or lack of it, it would seem that, over the course of the last 100 years, the more that New Zealand’s democratic rules have been changed, the more its fundamental political impulses have remained the same. It is, however, possible to make one important observation: the larger the winning party’s share of the popular vote (now known as the Party Vote) the more permanent its subsequent alterations to the country’s face tend to be.

The problem, of course, is that the most recent alterations have been executed without a mandate. The last time a political party sought, and got, a decisive electoral mandate to change the face of New Zealand it was 1972. (Some might say 1938!) Certainly, over the past 35 years, the biggest and most alarming instances of facial surgery (Rogernomics, Ruthanasia) have been accomplished without the patient’s informed consent – or an anaesthetist!

It is to be hoped that Willie Jackson’s use of the past tense when describing the dramatic changes to the face of New Zealand democracy is inadvertent. It is certainly difficult to make a case for the will of the majority of New Zealanders being any easier to impose today than it was 30 years ago. The “tyranny of the majority” that Willie complains of finds no confirmation in our political history: neither in the Pakeha world, nor Te Ao Māori.

The truly scary thought is that Willie sees the obstacles to achieving effective democratic majorities as a feature, not a bug, of our present system. If his idea of a new and improved New Zealand democracy is one in which, once again, the most determined minorities get to rule, then the change he is describing is not so much an uplifting electoral drama, as a political sucker-punch to the face.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 7 July 2022.

The Majority Is Always Wrong.

“No Minister”: Sir Humphrey Appleby’s working proposition was that government was far too important to be left to politicians – let alone the ordinary person in the street. To the silver-tongued Oxbridge mandarin, the top-down neoliberal revolutionary, and the uncompromising social-liberal public servant of 2021, majority rule will always be a dangerous proposition. 

THERE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN public servants who looked upon democracy as a dangerous innovation. The writers of the classic British television comedy Yes Minister captured this sort of public servant brilliantly in the character of Sir Humphrey Appleby. Sir Humphrey’s working proposition, that government was far too important to be left to politicians – let alone the ordinary person in the street – was a legacy of the aristocratic mode of government. A tradition which endured longer in Great Britain than just about anywhere else.

The creators of Yes Minister, Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, partisans of the political philosophy that would come to be known as “Thatcherism”, were fierce opponents of this aristocratic style – believing it to be one of the most significant causes of Britain’s national decline. Like Margaret Thatcher herself, they saw the ordinary man and woman in the street as an infinitely safer repository of political authority than any silver-tongued Oxbridge mandarin. Clear away the detritus of aristocratic snobbery (about which Thatcher, the grocer’s daughter, knew a great deal) and doctrinaire socialism, these “radical Tories” insisted, and all would be well.

New Zealand’s experience vis-à-vis its public service has been somewhat different. Here, the senior ranks of the nation’s public servants were profoundly mistrusted by the militant missionaries of neoliberalism. Not because their instincts were aristocratic (like Sir Humphrey’s) but because, thanks to New Zealand’s interesting political history, their instincts were high-mindedly social-democratic.

Throughout New Zealand history the most positive and long-lasting reforms and innovations have been initiated and administered by partisans of the state. To the men (and they were very nearly all men) who masterminded the bureaucratic coup d’état which gave this country “Rogernomics” and “Ruthanasia”, the idea of an activist state was anathema.

That the people of New Zealand might prefer their country to be run that way: that its positive freedoms gave them life chances they were loath to surrender; mattered not at all to these bureaucratic revolutionaries. In their eyes, the superiority of neoliberalism was self-evident. The idea of validating it at the ballot box was as nonsensical as voting gravity up, or down.

This disdain for, and outright hostility towards, the idea of popular sovereignty: manifested (at least initially) by the elite guardians of the neoliberal flame; was to have profound consequences for the future of democracy in New Zealand.

In terms of practical politics, the imposition of neoliberalism in New Zealand was hugely assisted by the legacy of the right-wing populist National Government of Sir Robert Muldoon. Shrewdly, the Labour politicians tasked with the imposition of policies utterly at odds with their party’s principles enlisted the aid of Baby Boomer activists from the new social movements: anti-racists, environmentalists, feminists, gays and lesbians; whose causes Muldoon had for so long frustrated. They were the social activists who largely replaced Labour’s democratic socialists and trade union advocates. With the anti-neoliberal resistance driven out of the party, these “social liberals” inherited what was left of Labour.

Unlike the “Old Left”, however, this “New Left” was profoundly suspicious of the ordinary man and woman in the street. In their struggles for women’s rights, Māori rights, gay rights and the “rights” of the natural environment, the new social movements often found themselves outnumbered – sometimes by as much as ten-to-one – by the conservative majority.

For many social liberals, therefore, democracy was not the solution, it was the problem. If majorities were allowed to rule, then genuine social progress would be reduced to a snail’s pace. At all costs, social liberal reforms must remain the preserve of political elites. Conscience votes cast by individual MPs were acceptable. Binding referenda, which gave the final say on radical economic and social reforms to the people themselves, were not.

A generation after Rogernomics and Ruthanasia, New Zealand has thus been ushered into the worst of all possible worlds. A political class, generally, and a public service, especially, in which democracy is viewed with hostility and suspicion; and majority rule derided as a right-wing mechanism for allowing racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic and transphobic prejudices to run riot.

Given the opportunity, this benighted Kiwi majority will vote in favour of treating every citizen equally, or, even worse, proudly uphold the principle of freedom of expression. Given a chance, this majority will vote for social-democracy over neoliberalism.

“And that, Minister, would be a disaster!”

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 29 October 2021.

Majority Rule Requires Majorities That Are Real.

Fifty Percent Plus One: New Zealand’s genuine-majority-delivering two-party system endured for five elections only (1938, 1943, 1946, 1949, 1951) a period of just 16 years. Very few New Zealanders alive today can boast of participating in an election which delivered a true majority to either Labour or National. Someone who contributed to National’s 54 percent share of the popular vote in 1951 will enter a polling-booth on 17 October 2020 aged 90+ years-of-age.

THE PROSPECT of the Jacinda Ardern-led Labour Party cresting 50 percent of the Party Vote has generated some odd responses. Perhaps the oddest of these is the suggestion that Labour’s popularity in some way discredits MMP. If we are going to go back to electing majority governments, runs the argument, then why do we need proportional representation?

To which the only reply is: “To make sure that majority governments enjoy real majority support.”

The last time a New Zealand government could lay claim to the support of more than 50 percent of electors was 1951. The snap-election of that year, called to bestow ex post facto justification on the Government’s handling of the bitter Waterfront Lockout, marked the high-water mark of the National Party’s electoral support. Three years later, the arrival of the Social Credit Political League as a fully-fledged contender for parliamentary representation, put an end to New Zealand’s remarkably pure two-party system.

Social Credit claimed a remarkable 11.2 percent of the popular vote in 1954. That result, had it been achieved under the MMP system, would have netted the Social Creditors an impressive 13-15 seats. Under the profoundly undemocratic First-Past-The-Post electoral system, however, the 122,573 New Zealanders who voted Social Credit remained unrepresented.

The 1954 general election is also highly instructive about the inherent unfairness of the FPP system. The two major parties finished the electoral race neck-and-neck. National took 44.3 percent of the popular vote, and Labour, just 1,602 ballots shy of National’s total, took 44.1. Now, in any fair system, the two major parties would have ended the election night with an equal number of seats – give or take. What actually happened was that National celebrated a comfortable victory – ten seats ahead of Labour.

And 1954 was far from being the worst example of FPP’s extraordinary power to distort the popular will. Twenty seven years later, in 1981, Social Credit won a gob-smacking 20.7 percent of the votes cast. This time, at least, it emerged from the fray with two seats. (MMP would have allocated Social Credit 24-26 seats!) It gets worse, however, because in spite of the fact that the Labour Party won 39 percent of the popular vote – 4,122 votes more than the National Party – the pugnacious National Prime Minister, Rob Muldoon, was returned to office with a narrow two-seat majority. In other words, with just 38.77 percent of the votes, National nevertheless ended the night with 51.09 percent of the seats in Parliament.

Pretty easy to see, then, just how far away from “majority rule” the FPP electoral system takes a country in which there are more than two effective political parties. New Zealand’s genuine-majority-delivering two-party system endured for five elections only (1938, 1943, 1946, 1949, 1951) a period of just 16 years. Very few New Zealanders alive today can boast of participating in an election which delivered a true majority to either Labour or National. Someone who contributed to National’s 54 percent share of the popular vote in 1951 will enter a polling-booth on 17 October 2020 aged 90+ years-of-age.

Even allowing for its capacity to ensure that the party holding the majority of parliamentary seats won them fair-and-square by securing a majority of the votes cast, the two-party system is very far from being without fault. Squeezing all the many interests and passions of a dynamic modern society into just two political parties is a recipe for what might best be called “structural disappointment”. The ruthless consensus enforcement required in what are perforce “broad church” parties inevitably leaves sizeable minorities feeling outmanoeuvred and aggrieved – with the dire results all-too-clearly on display in the Republican and Democratic parties of the United States. By making space for genuine political diversity, proportional systems encourage a much more vibrant – and representative – form of parliamentary democracy.

That two of New Zealand’s minor parliamentary parties, NZ First and the Greens, may end up being squeezed out of Parliament in the forthcoming election in no way discredits MMP. It merely signals that the conduct of these parties has been sufficiently unedifying to cause the electorate to shift its support elsewhere. Similarly, if the Labour Party have conducted themselves with sufficient grit and grace to claim the support of 50 percent-plus of their fellow citizens, then it fully deserves the chance to give us exactly what we voted for.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 25 September 2020.