Consider this an open thread for a bit of a social chit chat, debrief, speculation about what next, which of course will be subject to normal moderation rules. Be kind to each other please :-)
Sunday, 27 November 2011
The Day After The Night Before
Consider this an open thread for a bit of a social chit chat, debrief, speculation about what next, which of course will be subject to normal moderation rules. Be kind to each other please :-)
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14 comments:
Actually, I'm mostly thinking of you and yours, Julie. I hope that you and your family can at least have a bit of time to relax now.
Just saying:
Big thank you to the bloggers.
You added something almost unique to the election night coverage. Women's voices.
Appreciated.
Pretty depressing but not unexpected. I'm surprised by the loss of Christchurch Central, though - is that due to the earthquake, do you think?
Looking at the electorate seats only, only 18 of the 60 seats are now held by women. Haven't done the math for the list seats yet, and in any case they may change a little with final results. I watched The Nation this morning and that was an exclusively male line-up of interviewers and interviewed, save for two new Green MPs (Eugenie Sage and Holly Walker) making a brief appearance. How is it that when it comes to the TV stuff it's always the male half of the socalled "co-leadership" that fronts up?
Slightly better news than first broadcast on the turnout, but still not good. The official website says it was "estimated to be 73.83% of those enrolled as at 5pm Friday 25 November. This compares with a final 79.46% turnout of those enrolled in 2008. So it's fallen yet again, and on the whole it tends to be the left's consituency who stay home - especially as there was every reason for Labour-leaners to be discouraged this year. Still, at least we kept MMP, Brash has gone, Labour's electorate vote held up remarkably well, and the Conservatives got nowhere. Now we need MMP reform more than ever, so National can't do a cosy little electorate deal with the Conservatives next time.
I agree we need MMP reform, but any lowering of the threshold is likely to strength the Conservatives, not weaken them...
No, the threshold should stay at
5%. What should change is the rule which allows deals such as Epsom: that if a party wins one seat it gets the number of MPs its party vote entitles it to. (So if ACT had got 1.3%, Brash would have got in alongside Banks). There's a mistake in my previous comment, sorry - women have only 18 out of the 70 (not 60) electorate seats, including the Maori seats.
That doesn't sound very democratic! Why should a party get fewer seats than its party vote entitles it to, if it's going to be in parliament at all? Abolishing the threshold is a far better way to stop electorate deals from being relevant. I don't like the Conservatives any more than you do, but the problem is that people vote for them, not whether or not those votes translate into seats in parliament.
Yeah, I agree with commie mutant traitor. I've always felt that the threshold needs lowering - I don't know of any other country running MMP that has it so high (Germany, the model for NZ's adaptation, has it at 2%, and Germany has more problems with extremist parties than New Zealand)
The rule change you've proposed, Anne, might have locked the Greens out in 1999 - although in the end they didn't need Coromandel, I think the fact that they were going to win it meant that a lot of people felt comfortable party voting Green in the knowledge that their vote wouldn't be wasted even if the Greens failed to beat the 5% threshold.
I agree we should abolish the "bring a friend" rule, but lowering the threshold should be the corollary. There is sound logic in having a threshold of 3% or 4% to prevent lots of splinter one-man-band parties which would make it more difficult to form stable coalitions, but a threshold of 5% is too high to be justified in a democratic parliament.
So with a 3% threshold, if the Conservatives had won Rodney, you think they should have only been awarded one seat instead of the three their share of the party vote entitles them to? That turns a legitimate (if reprehensible) minor party into exactly the one-man-band you say you object to. I'm not convinced there'd be a real problem with countless splinter parties in the event of the threshold being abolished.
Why should a party's representation depend on whether they won an electorate seat?
It seemed entirely unfair that in 2008, NZ First received over 4% of the vote, while Act got 3.65% (IIRC), and got several seats. I think the link to electorate seats should be removed, and the threshold lowered to around 2-3%.
I have never understood the justification for removing the threshold in cases where a party wins an electorate seat.
It's the existence of the threshold that lacks justification. But the idea behind the threshold is that parties should be excluded from parliament entirely if they don't get enough support. But if they win an electorate seat, they _can't_ be excluded from parliament, so the purpose of the threshold can no longer be accomplished. In which case, why shouldn't they get seats in proportion to their share of the party vote?
I don't think it makes any sense to say that a party that gets under 5 percent should be excluded, but that they should get a proportion of seats in loine with their vote if they happen to win an electorate.
I can't see any justification for it, and I think it unjustly advantages parties that have the ability to "do a deal with a larger party. I would like to see the exemption dropped, and the threshold lowered to 2-3%.
I don't think it makes any sense to say that a party that gets 1.6% of the vote and wins an electorate should only get one seat, while a party that gets 3.2% of the vote should get four seats.
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