RODNEY HIDE: Henry Cooke wants a do-over if you vote wrong
The Post's political editor, Henry Cooke, has a plan if the MSM’s relentless campaign for the Opportunity Party fails. It’s a simple plan: if you vote the wrong way, you vote again.
He says so plainly. He wants Christopher Luxon and Chris Hipkins to promise that "if an overhang is the only path to government, then we'll ask the Governor-General to call another election instead." He says it "would be called a 'dirty deal' between the big two almost immediately."
Quite.
New Zealanders get their say once every three years. Parliament wrote the rules. Every voter gets two votes, one for an electorate MP and one for a party. If enough of us use our two votes to maximum effect and split our votes then we will get an overhang. Indeed, present polling consistently has National in overhang already with every party vote for National a wasted vote. That party votes for National may as well not be cast. Those votes could usefully be cast for ACT or New Zealand First. That's not cheating. That's MMP working exactly as Parliament wrote the law.
The cheating is Henry calling on the two old parties to conspire to defeat the votes of the people.
Henry has woken up that the campaign to split the vote gets the centre right returned despite the MSM’s best efforts to defeat the centre right by getting TOP over five percent. He doesn't like that result, so he wants the two old parties to pre-agree to throw it out and send us back to the polls until we get it right.
His plan is for National and Labour to agree before the election to a grand coalition with one job: rewriting the electoral law to suit themselves. In his own words, no supermajority would be needed, and no referendum. They'd change the rules, then call another election under the new ones. That's the political editor of a major newspaper urging the two biggest parties to fix the electoral system between themselves without asking voters or Parliament. He wants the fix in and he wants it now.
He frets that an overhang "would let well-organised minorities govern less-organised majorities." Henry, that's called campaigning. Persuading people how to use their votes is the whole point of an election, not a threat to it.
A journalist's job is to report on power and hold it to account, not to act as a broker for Labour and National. Or worse, a partisan hack for the Centre Left. It’s up to Parliament to decide our electoral rules. Until then, voters decide, with both their votes, and they don't need a second go because the political editor of The Post didn't like the first one.
Rodney Hide is a former Minister and ACT Party leader
Whoops Swiss system mention deleted
In fact it could help the cause toward improving our governance system. While a total switch immediately would be absurd a Royal Commission and a gradual shift toward Cantons and municipalities with the resources now currently used by central government alongside a greatly reduced central government has real merit. An executive team of 7 appointed from both houses of parliament and all parties would solve a lot of issues. To check it out compare the trajectory of their GDP per capita with ours on the OECD charts.
I read this first in the paper itself and immediately thought something's rotten in the state of Henry Cooke. I now put him alongside TV1's so-called senior political journalist - neither of them on any sort of pedestal.
More proof that the New Zealand MSM is nothing short of a vile collection of festering genital warts.
Fuck off Henry with your rabid woke excuse of a news platform, so woke that your mob had to remove the word “Dominion” from your masthead because you were so ashamed of being a whitey.
Its pricks like you that are facilitating turning New Zealand into the racist, divisive, unhappy country that it’s become.
You and your “POST” are a bloody disgrace.
Henry Cooke must be the biggest idiot in NZ, and that is saying a lot !