RICHARD PREBBLE: We decide how we vote
There are hysterical claims that vote splitting is somehow against the spirit of MMP.
MMP is not even fully proportional.
Last election, 159,585 party votes elected nobody. Yet these commentators are effectively saying National voters are being undemocratic if they refuse to waste their party votes.
I have split my vote for the last three elections.
I vote for Todd McClay because he is a good local MP. I vote for ACT because it has the best policies.
Apparently, that is perfectly legitimate.
But if a National supporter decides to vote for McClay and give ACT their party vote, commentators call it rorting MMP.
I know National supporters who believe ACT and New Zealand First have made this a better government.
But if their reason is that, on current polling, perhaps 800,000 National party votes will elect no additional MPs, why is their wish not to waste their vote illegitimate?
In a democracy, it is voters who decide.
Luxon may be determined to commit electoral suicide. We do not have to help him.
Richard Prebble is a former Minister and ACT Party leader who writes at I've Been Thinking
For those of us with fond dreams of Michael Laws being minister of broadcasting...Luxon has punctured that hope by stating ML will not have a ministerial position in any government he leads. Hurry up, Saturday, before he makes himself even more unpopular than he is already...
If the right loses National wont survive
CAn someone please explain the voting system to P M Luxon. Then perhaps why he has led National to lose support. At best they should be a minor party in the centre right coalition.
It beggars belief that National could, 'hand on heart' given all the recent polls to date, earnestly believe giving them "two ticks" is in NZ's best interests. It completely defies common sense, UNLESS, National are secretly contemplating engineering a grand coalition with Labour? Either way, and as I've said before, they deserve our contempt for considering the public so stupid. But then, maybe they (like them) are?
Whatever the outcome, the nursery rhyme about a rotund wall-sitter is about to come true.
And those critics are not lambasting the Maori Party for doing the same thing. It’s just ludicrous. By some polls, TPM have been extraordinarily successful in the strategy - with as little as 0.1% being recorded for their proportion of the party vote. But there are no loud noises about how that is a rort, unfair or gerrymandering. Not that I think it is, but the inconsistency is blatant.
Further, the media is quite happy about putting four seats into their seat calculations based on polls (glibly quoting the overhang , quite rightly) but then breathlessly say National only gets (say) 34 seats based on its showing in the polls. They don’t mention that fact that National will likely ge…