Economist Brian Easton asks: Why doesn’t our government reflect New Zealanders; why doesn’t Parliament make them?

This is a re-post of an article originally published on pundit.co.nz. It is here with permission.

There will be many claims over the next few months that the minor parties will hold the major parties/politics/New Zealanders to ransom. That reflects a misunderstanding of how our system works. Any ransom occurs because the two main parties will not contemplate a ‘grand coalition’ of the two forming the government. It has happened in the past – during the First World War and the Great Depression – but nobody considers that possibility nowadays.

I leave others to explain why, although allow me to add another, venal, reason. If the larger of the two parties forms a grand coalition then it will get, say, eleven Cabinet positions; if it joins up with a minor party it will get sixteen or more. The grand coalition option does not offer the same spoils to the victor.

(As an aside, all governments struggle to find enough people of ability to be valuable Cabinet ministers. The usual rule is that up to five in a cabinet deserve to be there on other than political grounds – there may be some junior members who will develop, but most do not. With luck a grand coalition might find ten — half a cbinet.)

We have gone to a lot of trouble to have a more representative Parliament under MMP; it is not a perfect system but it is much better than the previous system, where each seat was won on the basis of Winner Takes All. However, the resulting government is hardly representative because it is based on the winner-takes-all approach, which MMP was specifically designed to ameliorate.

I reported an example from the 2017 election in Not in Narrow Seas.

While New Zealanders’ fundamental political ideology probably did not change much between 2014 and 2017, that of the government dramatically did. The MMP electoral system produces a parliament which reflects the demography and ideology of voters reasonably closely, much more so than front-runner parliaments did. However, parliament selects the government on a winner-takes-all principle rather than a proportional one. In 2017 and perhaps always, there was no acceptable combination of parties which reflected the voters’ ideology. The choices offered, National–NZF and Labour–NZF–Green – others were ruled out – were some distance from the political centre. The first coalition was about 0.8 standard deviations to the right of the New Zealand centre on a left–right scale and the second about the same distance to the left. That meant that only about 15 percent of the population were on the right of the first coalition or on the left of the second. On the social conservative–progressive scale the first coalition was also about 0.85SDs on the conservative side, while the second was a slightly closer 0.65SDs on the progressive side, with about 25 percent more progressive. The sharp change in the politics of the government did not reflect a sharp change in the politics of the voters.

Don’t worry about the exact measurement. The kicker is in that last sentence. The substantial switch of the government from centre-right to centre-left did not reflect as great a change in the public’s political viewpoint, but rather reflected the eccentricities of how governments are formed in New Zealand. Had a grand coalition been formed, the result would have been a government closer to the public’s political preference.

My guess is that unless something dramatic happens, grand coalitions will be ruled out in the foreseeable future, so we are stuck with a winner-takes-all unrepresentative government. Is there anything we can do about it? The first thing is that the problem is not MMP. Sure, we can fine-tune the way we select MPs – and we should – but we are still stuck with a system of WTA government.

The only obvious improvement I can see – and it is not a total solution – would be a stronger, more independent Parliament, better at holding the government to account. It is not happening at the moment. Parliament makes a lot of noise, especially from the Opposition, but it is surprisingly ineffective. This is one thing the London Parliament does better than us. Even its government backbenchers show more independence and can challenge a particular policy of their own government. (It is possible that ours do so in caucus meetings, but the convention is not to report proceedings, which weakens any public accountability.) This may be because the London Parliament is six times bigger than the Wellington one, so there are more backbenchers trying to stand out.

How does one get backbenchers to be more challenging? Any proposals one would put up would be promptly blocked by the party leaderships. It certainly would help if MPs were to state repeatedly that their function, once they had chosen a government, is to hold it to account. When did you last hear an MP say that? It is not the same thing as mindlessly opposing the government – that is done very well – because good accountability is a constructive activity in which government backbenchers can be involved.

I’ve heard it said that the process happens in select committees, but I am unimpressed by those I have connected with. Usually legislation put before them by the government is a fait accompli, while their reviewing of bureaucratic failure is ineffective.

(Since I drafted this, it has been reported a select committee has found a government department – the Ministry of Local Government in the Department of Internal Affairs – has ignored them and redrafted a Three Waters bill according to its desires. The committee has given the officials a bollocking. Good on them. A reminder of who thinks they are in charge, and who ought to be in charge.)

The one place where Parliament accountability does work well is the Officers of Parliament. There are three:

            The Auditor General;

            The Commissioner for the Environment;

            The Ombudsman (who also deals with complaints under the 1982 Official Information Act).

However, there are other commissioners also charged with providing checks and balances on the bureaucracy but who are, bizarrely, subordinate to the self-same bureaucracy they are meant to be holding to account. They include:

            Chief Archivist;

            Commissioner for Children;

            Health and Disability Commissioner;

            Human Rights Commissioner;

            Police Complaints Commissioner;

            Privacy Commissioner;

            Race Relations Commissioner;

            Retirement Commissioner.

Is the independence of these commissioners compromised by their position in the bureaucracy? The short answer is that even where it is not currently, it can be. A longer answer is that there are cases where the ability of some commissioners to carry out their functions seems to have been compromised. (Even the Ombudsman is undermined by failing to vote the office sufficient funds to deal with OIA requests speedily.)

Instructively, Parliament has complied to demands from the bureaucracy to reduce the independence and powers of these commissioners. The case for the change is always in terms of bureaucratic rationalisation; the impact on accountability is never mentioned.

It is the usual complacent way we run New Zealand. When was the last time Parliament was strengthened? Thirty years ago when we introduced MMP? It is easy enough to identify instances where the power of Parliament has since been weakened. Are we really sure that we have a well-functioning system of government?

*Brian Easton, an independent scholar, is an economist, social statistician, public policy analyst and historian. He was the Listener economic columnist from 1978 to 2014. This is a re-post of an article originally published on pundit.co.nz. It is here with permission.