OLIVER HARTWICH: On borrowed calm
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Across the Tasman, anger has propelled Pauline Hanson’s One Nation from a fringe outfit to the most popular party, on 31 percent in a recent poll, ahead of both Labor and the Coalition. Yet Australia’s preferential voting, which redistributes losing candidates’ votes, could still return a Labor government.
The same anger is loose across the democratic world, the product of a decade of crises that squeezed household budgets and loosened party loyalties. What it does to each country’s politics depends partly on how votes are counted.
In Britain, Nigel Farage’s Reform leads on 27 percent, while the Conservatives and Labour, who once took turns in power, now muster little more than a third between them. First-past-the-post rewards whoever leads in each seat, so a quarter of the vote would hand Reform far more than a quarter of parliamentary seats and possibly a majority.
Germany shows a third system producing a different result. The hard-right AfD leads on 29 percent, ahead of the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, the rough equivalents of our National and Labour. Proportional representation gives the AfD a proportion of seats that matches its vote, but the other parties refuse to govern with it.
New Zealand uses Germany’s system, yet our politics looks much calmer than elsewhere. National and Labour are weak by past standards but still hold more than sixty percent combined.
New Zealand has faced nothing like the mass, often uncontrolled immigration fuelling anger abroad.
Part of the reason is a built-in valve for disquiet.
New Zealand First has long played the role of shock absorber, drawing off disquiet and turning it into a moderate parliamentary force able to govern with both sides.
There is no guarantee it will always work like that. Britain, Germany and Australia each had a party order that looked permanent.
Public anger is genuine, the product of years of watching the cost-of-living climb and of rapid social change. What the populists offer in return, closing borders and intervening in markets, would fix none of it.
Political stability rests on something no electoral system can supply. It needs a government that delivers price stability and the prospect of a better life, and voters who see it doing so. That is what a decade of inflation and stagnant incomes stripped from voters elsewhere.
Democratic politics must deliver on these bread-and-butter issues. If it does not, voters will look for answers elsewhere, and no electoral system or shock absorber will hold them here.
Dr Oliver Hartwich is the Executive Director of the New Zealand Initiative
As far as New Zealands political direction goes wrong, it's really quite simple = MMP. Get rid of that and we can return to what was once a country of fairness and equity. The continual tail wagging the dog will always be a burden holding this country back.
It isn't just the financial stupidty of the ruling class of this milennia that's created unrest... it's also the social upheaval of what started as political correctness in the 80's & has now led to all sorts of divisive anarchy...
NZ was once a fairly egalitarian society where everyone was roughly treated equal, regardless of ancestry, religion, gender preference etc...
Today there is all manner of division, driven predominantly by one side of politics, & then largely ignored by the other side...
We need to return to a society where equality is the measure, & drop all this equity bollocks... determination to do that will win as many votes as promises of tax cuts & improved prosperity.
While price stabliity is helpful, the primary problem we face is existential, not enconomic. Every nation requires a unifying meta narrative to provide social cohesion. Lacking that narrative, we devolve into competing tribes, each with their own political agenda.
There was a time when both our main political parties stood for something, adhered to core principles. Their core values shaped their worldview, and their public policy. They fought elections on the vision and the public policy that was shaped by those core values, all within the meta narrative that once held our nation together, for the most part at least.
We have spent the last 60 years deconstructing the Judeo / Christian cultural framework that provided the basis for our…
Nice overlooking of the elephant in the room, Oliver..
The anger in Europe comes from three decades of mass migration from countries which have completely different cultures to the West.
This was never voted on by the electotate, it was simply imposed from the top down. We were told diversity was good for us but we should never have the temerity to ask “How much diversity is enough?.”
European countries, and increasingly America and Australia, have been flooded with hundreds of thousands, or even millions of young fighting age men from Islamic countries.
These people hate western culture and everything it stands for, but are happy to come to the West and
take advantage of overgenerous asylum provisions and welfare…