I’m wanting to see more well-rounded policy that can be supported by the major parties regardless of ‘who floated it’, hoping for better enduring government rather than this ‘rip and replace’ bullshit.
Obviously with the right wong think tanks invading, this is nothing more than a thought exercise, but i reckon its worth exploring.
My heretical angle is significantly reducing thenterms that parties have in power - not extending to 4 years but instead reducing to 1 or 18 months. The thinking being: If you cant get anything done because the only work one is interested in doing is ideological nonsense that caters to a narrow part of society maybe it shouldn’t get off the ground in the first place?
There is an old saying “if you want to paint the perfect picture, make yourself perfect and paint naturally”.
We aren’t going to achieve any of your goals until and unless we decide to become a cohesive society with common goals. Unfortunately that’s never going to happen. Right wing forces deployed all over the world are also here fanning the flames of racism, sexism, and bigotry while amplifying every wedge issue then can find so that they can dismantle the state and privatise everything they can into the hands of the oligarchs.
The only way to fight this is by education and solidarity and unions.
That’s just a pipe dream though. New Zealand can’t even agree that our tax dollars should be spent on feeding our kids in schools and making us healthy when we are sick and injured and helping us out when we lose our jobs.
We could do something, like banning algorithmic social media. I don’t think banning the platforms would fly, but getting rid of the echo chambers and filter bubbles, this would go a long way to reducing the polarization in society.
Ban money in politics, only individual people can donate, capped at $500 per year. No political adverts from non-political parties. All donations to be on the public record.
I don’t think you can do either though. You have no control over what facebook or xitter does. Also you could ban donations but you can’t ban independent expenditures or promises of high paying jobs after the stint is over.
We could do what other countries do, and have a stand down time after leaving parliament before allowing ex-ministers to go into the lobbying sector. Even the US does this…no idea why we don’t.
We absolutely can require that FB/twitter et al, either vacate the country or comply with out laws.
They would vacate. We are too small of a country for them to care about.
I see that as a win
I don’t and I bet most other people don’t either.
Maybe we can invite competition. Let’s get the Chinese and the Russians in here.
Quality rant - love it and keep it up
Theres no legal way to fix this system.
Only money can choose who gains power, and power only chooses to benefit money.
Touché
We need to somehow disincentivise the current polarising where it becomes an us and them think. The left vs right. Boomers vs Millennials. The woke vs the… asleep?
At the moment, the divisive politics drives people to anger at the “others” and this gets people voting for their party of choice. It’s also a cornerstone of social media engagement, which I think is not unrelated.This divisiveness and means parties increasingly need to slide away from the centre to find more votes instead of having a big pool of people in the centre with many choices to vote for and parties actively trying to get votes from this pool.
I like the idea of parties that can pick and choose good policies without worrying about how it looks - e.g. Labour not adopting a good policy because it was proposed by National and so it would make Labour look like it was pandering to National voters. Our MMP system actually allows for a solution to this, where smaller parties can cherry pick good policies and campaign on them. I would argue that the Radical Centre is a representation of this.
I think shortening terms to 12-18 months would be bad. National came in, ran parliament under urgency for 100 days to pass a bunch of laws and rip out a bunch of laws the previous government brought in. Is this going to be the new standard, where successive governments just rip out the laws of the previous government? In my view reducing the term in government will just lead to faster turn around on repealing the previous government’s laws unless we fix the system that got us here.
I think we need to reduce the threshold to get parties into government. Avoid situations where Winnie gets to tell the big parties what to do under threat of leaving the coalition. Every election should have multiple possible coalitions.
I’d also accept a ranked choice voting system where people who want to vote for smaller parties can do so without worrying about wasting their vote.
Bicameral legislature .
One with elected MP. These represent local interests
Second for the party vote. 100 mps. One for each percentage of the vote they gather.
Then an advisory panel representing workers. Every sector of the economy chooses a representative to sit on the panel. They can come and go.
I admit I have never understood how bicameral parliaments operate. In this proposal of yours, how does a law get passed? Who proposes it, who votes on it, how do the two level interact?
And for the advisory panel, if each sector of the economy chooses a representative, how does that work? Does Fonterra put in a representative for the dairy industry? That doesn’t seem like the way to represent workers, but I’m not sure there are any unions representing dairy farmers since they are almost entirely small family owned companies. Who decides whether potato growers get a seat or if it’s just one seat for agriculture? How does this panel interact formerly with the law making process?
The party with the highest number of votes proposes laws, they have to pass both houses to become law, every vote is a conscious vote. We could put thresholds too if we want so that a simple majority isn’t enough.
The economy is already broken into sectors such as agriculture, technology, tourism etc. We could simply formalise these sectors and the N unions with the highest membership in each sector selects an advisor for the panel. The idea each sector can be broken down even further. For example if technology is a sector they can break it down into hardware and software or whatever.
Any law that is proposed would be submitted to the advisory panel where the experts would write a report listing the possible benefits and the harms of the law. They don’t get a vote.
The party with the highest number of votes proposes laws, they have to pass both houses to become law
This seems like one big parliament with extra steps. Is the benefit of this process that you are specifically getting MPs that represent specific areas to agree to pass it, separately to people whose party was voted in but personally they don’t answer to anyone? I guess while I can see some benefit of the two stages I’m not sure I get why it’s worth the effort. Is the benefit more in that you select them in a different way and on a separate cycle?
every vote is a conscious vote
I don’t get how that works in practice. Wouldn’t there be an expectation that MPs vote with their party, even if you claim it’s a conscience vote? Is there some law now that says MPs have to vote the way their party says?
Any law that is proposed would be submitted to the advisory panel where the experts would write a report listing the possible benefits and the harms of the law. They don’t get a vote.
I’m assuming the membership can choose whether or not to participate? E.g. the milking industry will want to participate in an advisory panel on water quality in rivers, but they may not care about laws relating to offshore oil drilling. How do you prevent this advisory panel from advising water quality isn’t an issue because the one tourism advisor representing the kayaker tour operators gets outnumbered by the dairy, agriculture, and power company representatives?
This seems like one big parliament with extra steps. Is the benefit of this process that you are specifically getting MPs that represent specific areas to agree to pass it, separately to people whose party was voted in but personally they don’t answer to anyone?
I guess I wasn’t clear. The elected MP are not partisan. They don’t run on party. They are local people in their area who run for parliament to represent their local interests. The “party house” is based on party vote and thus represents the country as a whole. Whichever party has the most votes gets to propose laws but all votes in both houses are based on conscious votes. Of course parties may and will whip their members but there is no coalition to ram things through.
Yes the purpose is to make things more deliberate and also make sure every law is able to pass the approval of local and national interests and of course is duly whetted by experts in the field.
I’m assuming the membership can choose whether or not to participate?
You mean like a union choosing not to send a representative? Yes if they don’t want any say then they don’t have to. We could set a number for that panel though and just allow the next union to send a rep.
E.g. the milking industry will want to participate in an advisory panel on water quality in rivers, but they may not care about laws relating to offshore oil drilling.
Yes of course but I think you’ll find most legislature will have side effects that impact the entire commercial sector.
How do you prevent this advisory panel from advising water quality isn’t an issue because the one tourism advisor representing the kayaker tour operators gets outnumbered by the dairy, agriculture, and power company representatives?
You can’t. If there is disagreement then it’s in the report. The purpose of the report isn’t to pass a go or no judgement, it’s to outline all the impacts on the lives of working people. Every policy will help some people and hurt others. It’s good to know that going in.
Thanks for all the clarifications. I would support giving this a go! I think NZ would be a great test bed for major reforms in western democracies, if only we could convince people to give it a go.
Obviously we are never going to give it a go. We are stuck in our ways and follow what we have been given to us by England.
I would love it if the country somehow agreed to a reset. Let’s declare ourselves a republic, let’s write a constitution, let’s set up new and better institutions that will protect human rights and democracy no matter who is in office.
Pipe dreams though. This country is way too conservative to think outside the box. Hell we can’t even legalise dope FFS.
I’m definitely in favour of ditching the 5% threshold, and i’d also be happy reducing the ratio of electorate:list MPs too (probably by increasing the size of the house).
I would also prefer all political party funding to be provided solely by the state and to ban private money from political parties entirely.
If we ditch the 5% threshold, the lowest you can go is the “natural” threshold. If we stuck with a 120 seat house that is ~0.83%.
You then either ignore the votes that were for parties below the threshold; or change the voting system to STV or similar.
I would be in favor of dropping the 5% to say 2-2.5% and bringing in some form of ranked choice, along with lowering the voting age. All this with upping (significantly) the civics education in schools, to get more people voting.
I don’t think the threshold should be removed completely. The electoral review from way back that no government ever did anything with recommended 4%. I think 3% would be OK too, but any lower and parliament wouldn’t get any work done because it would be full of conspiracy theorists.
Using a ranked voting system may let us keep the 5%, my goal would be to get more parties into government so the small parties didn’t get crazy amounts of power.
I would love political party funding to be state funded, but for this to be effective we need to do something about political organisations that are separate from the party. That Act/National supporters can just donate to the Taxpayers Union then the TU goes and does a bunch of political campaigning, that’s a serious flaw in the donation reporting requirements.
Im all about transparrnt or non-existent private funding!
Ranked voting seems oromising as well.
I just think that if enough people vote for some party that it would (absent a threshold) amount to 1 MPs worth of votes, that those people deserve representation even if its a conspiracy theorist nutter. But i’m open to ranked choice or other similar systems that are better at ensuring everybody has at least some say in who’s represented in parliament.
Agree re the dark money in the TU, NZ Initiative etc. But even if we found an effective way to nullify that the same interests still own most of the media and would spread their messaging and campaigns through influence on those outlets instead.
I just think that if enough people vote for some party that it would (absent a threshold) amount to 1 MPs worth of votes, that those people deserve representation even if its a conspiracy theorist nutter.
I imagine in such a world we would see that person thrown out of parliament on a regular basis, and using question time to ask pointless questions that don’t help anyone. I am not sure of the proper procedures but on thinking about it I think if we aligned procedures with the change it may work. E.g. you get proportional time in question time based on your party’s share of parliament or something. Changing the threshold to be a bit lower does sound more achievable though.
Agree re the dark money in the TU, NZ Initiative etc. But even if we found an effective way to nullify that the same interests still own most of the media and would spread their messaging and campaigns through influence on those outlets instead
Yeah, a tale as old as time. I hope humanity one day works out a solution.
The issue with that suggestion is, it takes much less time to throw out what the last government was doing than to actually do something yourself.
The best way to stop “rip and replace” is to stop fucking up, in my view. The ferry project is a classic example, set to be over a billion dollars over budget, and the boats are only 550 mil each, and the boats were absolute monsters, far bigger than we needed.
Three waters is another example, if Labour had dropped the co-governance aspect, the project would likely have gone ahead without too much controversy, but they pushed ahead with a wildly unpopular proposal, and it was a big part of why they lost the election.
The problem with not fucking up is we have two conflicting ideologiea (or, a bit different if we’re gettig technical), so one man’s trash policy is anothers treasure. How can that be anythibg other than a fuck up?
One person’s trash policy is not another’s treasure, sometimes it’s simply a failure.
the only reason co governance was controversial is because farmers are too greedy and the population is too racist.
Ironically, “running the country like a business”.
Have policy outline an objective, Set KPIs, thresholds, etc. If the policy fails to meet them it gets automatically canned. Otherwise it’s safe.
Want to lower road deaths, that is your policy “lower road deaths by 2030 by 10%”. (Largely) A goal everyone can get behind.
But you’ve got to specify how you measure it, allow all parties to add their own metrics like “average journey time must not increase by 5%” or “maintain 99% licensing in rural communities”.
How you achieve the policy is (mostly) irrelevant. Want to do it by lowering speed? Fine. But that might increase journey time significantly. You could improve driver training, but that might impact rural communities.
Subsequent governments could cancel it, but only if it’s failing its KPIs, or if their new policy is “don’t lower road deaths” or “make cars go faster”
Sounds like the interpetation of statistics becomes a very subjective game.
Any metric that becomes a target, ceases to be a useful metric and all that
