MMP

MMP....A lottery

When you divide your time between two countries you naturally end up doing Lot's of comparisons. The differences are stark. Japan has it's huge population of 127 million while NZ is relatively empty with only 4 million. One is heavily industrialised while the other is basically a glorified farm. Race, language, culture, history, attitude....all poles apart.  Physically speaking there's some similarities....both consist of a string of islands in the Pacific Ocean. Roughly the same land area, at the same latitude North and South with similar volcanoes and earthquakes thrown in. For me however the greatest similarity is the way the people of these two countries have buried their heads in the sand when it comes to the choosing who should run the country. NZ can be summed up with this....A country with tremendous potential which will never be achieved due to the fact that it's people insist on letting a bunch of dummies run the place. For Japan it's like this......A country which achieved it's full potential 20 years ago and is now in decline due to the fact that it's people insist on letting a bunch of dummies run the place.

The reason for this particular observation is that it is election time here in NZ. Yes it's that time that comes around every 3 years where the elite try to persuade the peasantry that they actually live in a democracy and that what they think really matters. I don't ever bother to vote here as I don't want to participate in this farce. People say to me "if you don't vote, you can't complain".  Whenever anyone says this to me I want to punch them in the face and scream "wake up you moron" at them. This statement is not only a worn out cliche but is completely wrong. By not voting I have more right to complain about the result than someone who has.  If you vote you are supporting the system and directly influencing the result....therefore you cannot complain as you got the result you contributed to. By voting you give politicians a mandate to pass all sorts of laws while agreeing that you will only hold them accountable on a day 3 years in the future. It's not that I am anti democracy, it's just that I don't care for our style of democracy. Foreigners who live in japan often complain that they pay taxes but aren't allowed to vote but really, would you want to? It's even more of a scam than NZ. There are parties within parties and anyway it's all irrelevant as it's the bureaucrats that actually run the country. If I had the right to vote in Japan I'd sell it for the price of a bottle of Kirin beer and consider it a good deal.

Aiding and abetting NZ's politicians in this smoke and mirrors show is our fantastically ridiculous electoral system called Mixed Member Proportional or MMP. Now most people have never heard of MMP. It was dreamt up shortly after World War II by the victorious allies. Fed up with the German's penchant for marching all over Europe, the big winners decided that an electoral system that kept Germany weak and divided was the best insurance to avoid a re-run. (Remember, Hitler was voted into power). Voila...MMP was created. As Italy was guilty by association, MMP was also forced onto the Italians. 65 years of peace in Europe and 60 Italian coalition governments since 1946 show that it's worked a treat. Yep...Coalition governments are the name of the game under MMP so you know that another Mr. Hitler isn't comming up through that system.  Japan dodged this particular bullet when the Americans decided to run Japan as their own colony and appointed General MacArthur as head honcho. He went on to become the best leader Japan ever had and set the country up for great things.  The only other place of note to use MMP is Venezuela where El Presidente Hugo Chavez seems to be having a lot of fun with it.

For some weird and unexplained reason New Zealand adopted this insane system of it's own free will in 1996. (the huge disinformation campaign that was run at the time may have had something to do with it). At the best of times coalitions tend to be unstable marriages of convenience that are cobbled together by some unlikely bedfellows. They tend to have uninspirational leaders and avoid contentious issues in case one of the partners gets upset and throws their toys out of the cot. Middle of the road Mediocrity flourishes under this system but ironically, MMP provides a home for extremists, personality cults and one  trick pony parties too. The party list vote is the real joker in the pack with MMP. I won't bore anyone with the details but under MMP, people who get soundly rejected by their electorates can slide on into parliament on their party list. Cannabis smoking hippies, militant unionists, professional protesters, radical free marketeers and Maori separatists have all made it to the big time much to the disgust of the average Kiwi who has taken 15 years to wake up to the fact. Another perverse consequence is the advent of minority governments, something which is not supposed to happen under a proportional system. Election night is more like watching the lotto results as nobody knows how things are going to shake down. Even after all the smoke has cleared the results can be mind boggling. Parties who get 4.9% of the popular vote can get nothing while parties with 2% can end up with 3 or 4 seats! Under MMP the average voter has no clue who will actually benefit from his vote so the parties can fill their ranks with talentless dummies. Negotiations and horse trading on forming a government can go on for weeks. Principles and promises get dumped rather quickly when the prospect of a ministerial limousine is dangled. History teachers can become finance ministers and lawyers can run hospitals. One party managed to stitch together an arrangement that lasted 9 years and which rammed through some highly unpopular and controversial laws in order to keep it's coalition partners happy and itself in power.

Elections are always a circus of false promises and bribes but under MMP the promises and bribes must be so much bigger as you have to appeal not only to your voter base but to those of your potential coalition partners. This has led to some ruinous policy and bad legislation which breed huge problems for future generations. Our welfare system is unaffordable. Our superannuation system is unsustainable. Our immigration policy undermines our culture and traditions and our education system is a failure. Our current PM is a likeable chap who has spent the last 3 years smiling and waving at everyone while telling them that everythings going to be OK and that we don't need to change anything. He's smiling because he's figured out a couple of things. NZ doesn't have a written constitution so there's nothing that isn't negotiable. There is apparently a bill of rights but nobody knows what it says because nobody has read it. So governments can make things up as they go along. 

There are only a handful of things Kiwis really care about. 

1 The right to go to the beach and catch a fish. 

2 The right to see All blacks rugby games live on free to air TV. 

3 The right to speculate in residential real estate and pay no tax on the profits. 

4 The right to watch Coronation Street (a long running British soap opera) on prime time TV

These things are taken as sacred and God given. Any government that messes with these rights will find itself out on it's ass in short order. If it didn't mess with these things a single party government could do whatever else it liked....Want to turn the country into a Republic?....No problem. A new flag perhaps?....lets have a design competition. Our current PM knows he could slip a lot of things through that would be good for the country but he won't rock the boat because he knows that in MMP coalition governments the tail wags the dog and if you want to stick around in his job it's better to do nothing.  Our PM is going to smile and wave his way into a second term because he knows this.