Is the new Government legitimate?

elocal Magazine, ed. 200. 3 November 2017

There’s been a huge amount of comment since our election on 23 September about the inordinate length of time that Mr Peters took to decide which of the two main parties he was going to anoint, and a great deal of anger when he finally anointed Labour.

But the time taken to decide on a new government was in fact very short indeed by the standards of most other countries – only 12 days after the final votes were announced.   Germany had an election on the same day that we did – 23 September – and they are widely expected to take till early in the New Year to form a government.  The Netherlands has taken an average of three months to form a government in its elections since 1945, and Belgium once took 18 months.

But surely it can’t be right for a government to be formed which is simply a “coalition of losers”, as the headline in an Australian newspaper called the new government?  Surely the new government should have included National, which won considerably more votes than Labour did?  Surely Mr English should have been given the first right to try to form a government?

Well of course, Mr English did have an absolute right to try to form a government.  His problem was that National did not have enough MPs after the election to form a majority in Parliament, and the only party virtually certain to support National in preference to Labour was ACT, and they had only a single MP – not enough to get a National-ACT coalition over the line.

In a situation where Labour was never going to go into coalition with National (though that kind of government is formed from time to time in Germany), and where the Greens had ruled out any accommodation with National, the only party with the potential to move in either direction was New Zealand First.  And they chose Labour.

Had the Greens been primarily interested in the environment, as they often claim, and not at least equally intent on moving the country to the left, the situation would have been entirely different.  National would then have been in a position to bargain from a position of strength with both New Zealand First and the Greens.  We could well have seen the formation of a National-Greens government.  In Germany, it is expected that the most likely coalition will be the equivalent of a National-ACT-Greens coalition.

What we now have is a government supported by 50.4% of those who voted.  National and ACT together were supported by just 44.9%.  (Some 4.6% of party votes were wasted, spread across almost a dozen small parties.)  The government we have is absolutely legitimate.

But why did a majority of voters want to turf out a government which had, on the face of it, successfully taken us through both the Christchurch and Kaikoura earthquakes and the Global Financial Crisis – delivering strong growth and low unemployment?

Some say that voters were tired of years of “neoliberalism”, and that people were rebelling against the “failure of capitalism”.  But when you ask people if they want a return to high inflation, or 66% tax rates, or waiting lists to buy cars, or strikes on the inter-island ferries, most people answer “of course not”.  In fact, most people have no idea what “neoliberalism” means – they just know that “neoliberalism” and “capitalism” are the cause of all that is wrong with the country, with the growing inequality, with the homelessness, with the overcrowding, with the child poverty.

Yes, we have some serious social problems at the moment, but they are overwhelming the result not of so-called neoliberalism, or capitalism, but of the government policies – at central and local level – which have created some of the most expensive housing in the world.

If the median house price in Auckland were three times the median household income, as used to be the case, most of the social problems of overcrowding, homelessness and child poverty would disappear.  Instead, the median house price is now ten times the median household income, and people talk about “affordable housing” as being that which costs less than $600,000, a figure well beyond the reach of even those on the average wage.

Will the new Labour-NZ First-Greens government last?  I rather suspect not, if only because the expectations they have raised for ending child poverty, solving the housing crisis, and increasing real wages will be very hard to meet – and probably impossible to meet without puncturing the housing bubble.  Puncturing the housing bubble and still winning re-election in 2020 would be a very tough assignment.

A final comment on MMP.  There are still far too many people who don’t understand it, and that includes many in the media. 

The New Zealand Herald ran a series of articles before the election on so-called “battleground electorates”, with a careful analysis of whether they were likely to fall to National or to Labour.  Of course, with MMP there are almost no “battleground electorates”.  The only electorates where the electorate vote had the slightest influence on the outcome of the election were Epsom, where David Seymour won, adding one MP to the centre-right tally, and Waiariki, where the Maori Party candidate Te Ururua Flavell lost, resulting in the disappearance of the Maori Party from Parliament.  Electorate votes in every other electorate were absolutely irrelevant to the outcome of the election.

And we still hear comments that Labour could never agree to a binding referendum on the Maori electorates because if those seats were abolished Labour would lose seven MPs.  That is absolute nonsense: the number of MPs the Labour Party has is determined only by Labour’s share of the party vote, and that entitled Labour to significantly more MPs than won electorates.

At time of writing, I have not yet had a chance to see the detail of the coalition agreement between Labour and NZ First.  Next month I will write a commentary on that agreement.

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Copyright © 2024 Don Brash.