PETER WILLIAMS: Maori seat manipulation

How a clever campaign could help derail Chris Bishop

There’s an intriguing campaign underway to try and manipulate the existence of the Māori electorates at the next two elections – this year and 2029 - and possibly for 2032 as well.

That’s because the existence of seven such constituencies is guaranteed through the next two elections and there won’t be a review of their number and boundaries until at least 2030. Now that the census has been abandoned and replaced with otherwise available government data, there’s no guarantee the number of seats will change for 2032 either.

So with that in mind a woman named Katrina Smit, who lives in the Hutt Valley and has been on the Māori roll for over thirty years voting in the Ikaroa-Rawhiti electorate, has decided to switch to the general roll and vote in Hutt South, a seat currently held by National Party heavyweight Chris Bishop by a slender 1332 votes.

Her reasoning is that the seven Māori electorates will be won by either Labour or Te Pati Maori anyway and thus be part of a potential left leaning (almost to the floor!) coalition government.

What that coalition then needs is for many of the marginal general seats to swing to the left too. To help that cause, as many good Māori lefties as possible should get off the Māori roll and join a general seat, especially the close ones like Hutt South, Mt Roskill, West Coast Tasman, New Lynn and Banks Peninsula.

Ms Smit tells us in her opinion piece for the e-tangata.co.nz website that there were 4416 Maori roll voters registered inside the boundaries of Hutt South last election. If a sizeable chunk of them shifted to the general roll to vote in Hutt South the task of rolling Chris Bishop and replacing him with Labour’s Ginny Anderson would be a lot more straightforward.

The plan is quite brilliant in its simplicity and if it’s well organized could be stunningly effective. But it is surely another reason to put the question of the Māori seats firmly in the headlights.

The essential folly of the seats is that they are based on the number of Māori in the population, not on the number of Maori who want to vote in those seats. Therefore the average number of voters in the seven Maori electorates is 43,335. The average number enrolled in the general seats is 51,488.

The plan hatched by Ms Smit to get more of her left leaning fellow travellers to ditch the Māori roll for the general in marginal seats – they have till August 6 to do that – could reduce the average number in the Maori seats even more.

That’s not fair to those on the general roll because the difference in the size of a Maori electorate and a general seat mean a vote in one of the 64 general seats has a value equivalent to only 82 percent of one in a Māori electorate anyway.

And that’s the issue. Not all votes are of equivalent value, which I would have thought was fundamental tenet of a democratic system.

The rider is that we have MMP and thus the proportionality of parliament is based on where our party vote goes. But the increase in electorates from 65 to 71 since MMP came into effect three decades ago means many parliaments since 1996 have included extra MPs over and above the designated 120. Indeed the current parliament has 123 MPs because of the number of seats won by Te Pati Maori is out of proportion to its party vote.

We won’t know how successful or otherwise this campaign by Katrina Smit will be. But with enthusiastic backing from the state broadcaster RNZ which takes great delight in republishing material from the activist website e-tangata.co.nz there will surely be some impact.

This attempted manipulation should be a warning sign to the National Party. One of their key people is under enough threat of losing his seat and probably his place in parliament anyway without this kind of campaign coming out of the woodwork.

Maybe his lacklustre leader could use this scenario to finally get the National Party to take a firm stance on the abolition of the Māori electorates and put their existence to the country in a referendum.

But then pigs might fly.

Writer and broadcaster for half a century. Now watching from the sidelines. Subscribe to Peter William's Substack here