MMP defector MP - more info

[New Democracy]

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
  [ @ / @  ]
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    (_)         "The views expressed on this programme
    ____)       are bloody good ones." Fred Dagg, 197?
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Marcus
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Donald Eric Davison of New Democracy at http://www.mich.com/~donald

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