MMP defector MP - more info

[Olli Salmi]

I agree that MMP is an improvement over the first-past-the-post and I also
think it's more likely to be adopted than the Single Transferable Vote. I
think the example of New Zealand (and the good Web pages describing it) is
important here.

I don't think it's an improvement over the present Finnish electoral law.
We use d'Hondt between parties and Single Non-Transferable Vote within
parties. That is, the voter votes for one person and the ones with the most
votes get elected. The voter can choose between candidates, while in MMP
the voter can only choose between parties.

In Sweden they have additional seats which I understand go to the
candidates that were not elected in their consituencies. (The whole Swedish
electoral law is online, in Swedish.)

Defection from a party must be legal whatever one has pledged, it's one way
to make party leadership accountable.

Olli Salmi
Finland

>Dear members of Election Methods list,
>
>When I first learned of MMP I was opposed to it because I am opposed to
>Single Seat Districts and Party List. But the combination of the two does
>yield very good proportional representation(PR) to the people for political
>parties across all the districts - and the most important need of PR is for
>political parties.
>
>So I say that the second vote for party is an improvement.
>
>Now I would like to have more improvement and I feel we can have more with
>some changes in the design features of MMP.
>
>One change I would like to see is to drop the single seat districts and
>have districts of two or more seats and calculate the winners in the
>districts using Preference Voting/STV with Hare Quota and fractional
>transfer. There is a world of difference in PR between one and two seats.
>
>With two or four seats most of the needed PR for the political parties
>would take place in the districts which means that less member seats would
>need to be reserved for the second vote party list.
>
>With two or four seats the door will be open for both genders to have PR.
>Once both genders have this power then they will look past gender and vote
>based on other concerns - but they must have the power to vote by gender.
>This rationale is also true for other considerations like race and ethnic.
>More seats per district will give this power to the voters.
>
>The second change would be to take the control of the party list out of the
>hands of the parties and have each party list be composed of the failed
>candidates of a party with the candidates placed in order of high vote
>tally first.
>
>Today's MMP is an improvement but that does not mean that we cannot have
>other improvements.
>
>The main value of MMP is that it is a system that can and is being adopted
>by countries. That is a very important advantage. I became sold on MMP
>after what happened in Mexico. That country had a single ruling party for a
>very long time without MMP. Their last national election used MMP and that
>party no longer has a majority.
>
>Speaking of MMP, New Zealand, which now has MMP, had a member change
>parties even after she signed a vow that she would resign if she dropped
>out of the party that elected her. I present below more info from New
>Zealand.
>
>Don
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>Marcus wrote:
>
>Hi Tom,
>Your message didn't come through very well - but I got the gist.
>
>What has happened is that Alamein Kopu, an Alliance MP has resigned
>from the Alliance and now sits as an independent.
>
>It is worth remembering that ALL Alliance MPs signed a pledge before
>the election stating that if they were to leave the Alliance they
>would resign from Parliament.  The day before she resigned she
>renewed her pledge (as a witnessed oath).  When parliament resumed
>today the Speaker (Doug Kidd, National formerly Minister for
>Fisheries) accepted a request from Jim Anderton to refer the matter
>to the privileges committee stating that he saw a prima facie breach
>of privilege and reasserting the power of the privileges committee to
>expel an MP.  This power was challeneged by the PM and Winston.
>
>Also worth noting is the fact that Michael Cullen (Deputy Leader of
>the Labour Party, Associate Minister of Finance in dying days of the
>Fourth Labour Government) has a private members bill before the house
>that would force list MPs to resign from Parliament if they left
>their party.  This bill has never one the ballot so is yet to be
>debated.  Previously the Alliance opposed this, largely because they
>feel the same provision should apply equally to electorate MPs - the
>defection of whom would also cause an imbalance in proportionality.
>While they have reversed this position it has been adopted by the PM.
>(IMHO the answer to this objection is to require electorate MPs to
>resign and recontest their seat - if they win the result would be a
>less proportional parliament but if we are to have a two tiered
>system this is what you get.)
>
>Ms Kopu has adopted a position of only speaking Te Reo Maori in the
>house.  While everyone accepts her right to do so, many are bemused
>because she has only spoken once in the house thus far (her maiden
>speech).  She also has a very poor attendence record which raises the
>issue of her proxy.  It appears she has given this to Ron Mark (NZF
>Whip).  The NZF Maori MPs held a celebration for Kopu when she
>annouced her resignation from the Alliance and Tau Henare (Deputy
>Leader NZF Minster for Maori Affairs and Sport)  has stated that she
>is welcome to join NZF.  Kopu's cousin John Delamere has stated that
>he would see this as most inappropriate.
>
>I hope this helps.
>Today's edition of Hard News follows.  You should be aware that
>Russell Brown (author) is a member of the Grey Lynn Labour Party.
>
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>------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
>
>HARD NEWS SCOOP!
>
>Righto, on with the show ...
>
>GOOD DAY MEDIAPHILES ... I don't know whether to be disgusted, amused or
>depressed. I always suspected things would get a bit strange as we settled
>in to a new electoral system - but I frankly didn't expect the problem to
>be a granny from Opotiki intent on slashing the seats in the theatre of our
>democracy.
>        Alamein Kopu, 12th of the Alliance's 13 list MPs, had been making
>it known she was unhappy in Parliament - or unhappy in the Alliance - for
>several weeks. The Alliance wasn't too delighted with her either, given
>that she hadn't been turning up for work very often.
>        This week, she left the party to become an independent MP. I trust
>most of you can grasp the constitutional enormity of what she did. Alamein
>Kopu was elected off the list by Alliance party votes and although, as she
>has demonstrated, she can freely desert the party, morally, she has no
>right to be in Parliament.
>        In her Te Tai Rahwiti electorate, the vote which could be regarded
>as a personal endorsement, she picked up only 1200 votes. My good friend
>Paul Rose points out that he picked up more than that in the last Auckland
>local body elections and could he please have a job in Parliament too? He
>has a point. More distressing, however, is the way this has all unfolded.
>        What it goes back to is a power struggle in one of the Alliance's
>constituent parties, Mana Motuhake. When asked to produce a list of
>condidates for incorporation into the Alliance's own party list last year,
>a faction of the Maori party's membership responded, essentially, by
>excluding the candidates favoured by the Alliance leadership. Broadcaster
>and unionist Willie Jackson actually changed parties after he was put right
>at the bottom of Mana Motuhake's list. Kopu, a social-working granny on a
>benefit, was propelled to near the top of the list, just below Sandra Lee,
>who had, ironicallt, bucked the rest of the leadership in pushing her case.
>        As an Alliance candidate, Kopu signed a pledge saying she'd leave
>Parliament if she left the Alliance. Then, in June, she admitted she was
>considered leaving. Just last Saturday, as Alliance leader Jim Anderton
>tried to persuade her to stay, she signed another pledge, in which Anderton
>and Lee agreed that she'd be given special help to settle in to Parliament,
>and she made a "solemn commitment" to stay with the party.
>        Trouble is, it now looks like on the same Saturday she was also out
>gathering signatures for a petition supporting her decision to clear out of
>the party. And by the time she turned up for what were supposed to be final
>negotiations about her future in Wellington, she'd already told the media -
>but not Anderton and Lee - she was going. It was disgraceful. Derek Fox
>reckons the reading of her as a victim was always a mistake, that she's a
>hard, calculating woman - and after watching her shaft the people she was
>supposed to be negotiating with, I'm inclined to agree. This shouldn't come
>as too much of a surprise - after all, that latterday saint, Dame Whina
>Cooper, could be ruthless when it suited her, or her chums in the National
>Party.
>        If nothing else, MMP has exposed all of us to the complications of
>Maori politics - and its curious way of inflating personal differences,
>such as those which developed between Kopu and Lee, into political
>factions. The Evening Post even ventured that the split came down to Lee's
>non-tribal stance over Maori fisheries allocation. That looks to me less
>like fact than the result of an unhelpful contribution from Sir Tipene
>O'Regan, who has long feuded with Lee over her support for the dissident
>Ngai Tahu hapu from which she hails, and plainly figured he'd get a low
>blow in while he could.
>        Kopu says now she'll be an independent Maori MP and she'll only
>speak in Parliament in Maori. Now, I'm all for te reo in The House, it's an
>oratorical language, after all  - but the granny from Hell is using it most
>selectively. On the day after her departure, she declared she would only
>speak to the media in Maori - and then went and spoke at length in English
>to the Maori news service Mana News.
>        Shabbiest of all, however, has been the role played in this by some
>New Zealand First MPs. Until John Delamere told his deputy leader to shut
>up, Tau Henare had been loudly braying that he'd always thought the
>Alliance's commitment to Maori was "corrupt" - and that Kopu was most
>welcome to join New Zealand First. It did not occur to him that to do so
>would be to steal the rights of more than 20,000 Alliance voters. Ethics
>don't come easily to some people.
>        Now, Kopu is "independent", but New Zealand First threw a party for
>her on the night [she] shafted the Alliance, and it seems likely that at the
>least her proxy vote, which is used when she's not in Parliament - ie, a
>lot - will go to NZ First. Did all those Alliance voters cast their votes
>in order that she could vote with a National Party coaltion? I really don't
>think so.
>        So, where to now? As Anderton pointed out, it's a bit rich saying
>honour the signatures on a 150-year-old Treaty when you can't even honour
>the pledge you signed last weekend. Goodwill, a vital element in the
>settlement of Treaty grievances, is being eaten away; and so is the
>credibility of Maori political representation, and so is MMP itself - which
>offers so much for Maori.
>        Unfortunately, the Maori MPs who are taking the process seriously -
>Georgina Te Heuheu on the National benches, Donna Awatere with Act, Dover
>Samuels, Nanaia Mahuta and Tariana Turia with Labour and even Delamere with
>NZ First, stand in the shadow of the less able, and considerably less
>attractive Maori members.
>        Kopu, who complained about the House being a "lion's den", has
>buddied up with Winston Peters, who gets drunk and assaults people in the
>lobby, Tau Henare, who manhandles reporters and threatens to cut off their
>broadcast funding, Tuku - well, we all know about Tuku - and Rana Watai,
>the fat, lazy ex-cop who rants on about "woofters" and abolishing the bills
>of rights in his Sunday newspaper column and has fights with his duvet in
>Australian hotel rooms.
>        The saddest and strangest thing of all is that as Mana Motuhake
>itself struggles for leadership, Matiu Rata lies critically ill in hospital
>after a freak road smash. Rata arguably began the new Maori politics by
>resigning from the Labour Party, founding Mana Motuhake and mounting a
>credible challenge to Labour's mortgage on the Maori seats in the ensuing
>by-election. Kopu's grab for money and power - which will effectively
>destroy the party Rata created - looks pretty shabby in the circumstances.
>        I'm personally disappointed in what has happened because I thought
>it was a demonstration of the beauty of MMP that someone could come off a
>benefit and into the Parliament. Now, it's a bloody debacle.
>
>
>    ==  ==      Russell Brown
>  [ @ / @  ]
>     /        ________________________________________
>    (_)         "The views expressed on this programme
>    ____)       are bloody good ones." Fred Dagg, 197?
>              _________________________________________
>    |||
>-------------------------------
>
>
>Marcus
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>
>Donald Eric Davison of New Democracy at http://www.mich.com/~donald
>
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