Votes
September 20th, 2005 at 7:02 pm by David FarrarRodney Hide makes the point that the four basically centre right parties won 1,015,689 votes – which is 14,535 more than the four leftwing parties who got 1,001,154.
No tag for this post.
Rodney Hide makes the point that the four basically centre right parties won 1,015,689 votes – which is 14,535 more than the four leftwing parties who got 1,001,154.
No tag for this post.
September 20th, 2005 at 7:23 pm
Nice try, Rodney! And to be fair, the spin is working: “centre right” is often trotted out by the media without much qualification. But a reminder:
1. Parties that clearly said (in advance) they would support Clark: 47%
2. Parties that clearly said (in advance) they would support Brash: 41%
3. Parties supporting neither Clark nor Brash: 8.5%
4. Maori Party (clearly anti-Brash, if not pro-Clark): 2%
Can anybody explain why a voter wanting National’s tax cuts or other policies would not tick National or Act? Why would they have thrown away their party vote on those whose platform was simply “we’ll follow the winners”?
Vote:September 20th, 2005 at 7:40 pm
Applying the same logic, Gore won in 2000. No, the election result has to depend not on outright numbers but the permutations that occur from the actual electoral system.
In much the same way we accept that the narrow Florida result in 2000 made Bush president, we need to accept that the Maori Party and subsequent overhang can decide the outcome of this election just past.
Vote:September 20th, 2005 at 8:00 pm
Yep agree with Aaron here. One thing is for sure, MMP is going to be short lived after this election.
Most dumbass’s I have spoken to “thought” MMP was a maximum of 120 seats…they are astounded that there can be more.
Never mind, We will just watch and wait to see what happens. Personally I think it was an election that you either had to win well or else it was all going top get too hard.
I think Mrs Peter Davis will be struggling to keep everyone happy resulting in no one being happy.
We will need to keep a close eye on the promises as I can’t see those ever being kept by that ragtag mob once the pork barrells get rolling.
I predict the students will be the first to cop it, then WFOPF will get the axe as well.
Vote:September 20th, 2005 at 8:29 pm
I’m just curious, Whaleoil, as to why you believe MMP will be short-lived after this election. Yes, a coalition government needs to be formed, and a coalition government looks likely to be formed.
It is not in the best interests of any of the parties who have first shot at a coalition to call for another election anytime soon so it is likely that no matter how rough it gets, this will be a 3 year term.
And I don’t know about you but I really think that this election merely proves that MMP works, and that it works much better than FPP.
Vote:September 20th, 2005 at 8:38 pm
“Overhang” could very easily be cured by treating parties the same as independents. Something I have argued for well, since I found out the independants were treated differently…
Vote:September 20th, 2005 at 8:44 pm
Who’s the tosser posting under “What Mandate” on Rodney’s blog. Seems like someone who is very, very bitter.
Vote:September 20th, 2005 at 9:13 pm
Rodney is correct that the apartheid seats for Maori have distorted things. But what would have happened without them is that Labour would have gotten those votes. It wouldn’t translate into four seats for sure.
I more disagree about the idea that the Winston First Party is somehow in the centre-right. They are authoritarian to the core and more socialist than free market and more socially authoritarian than liberal. Winston is almost the polar opposite of Hide. So I would have four corners. One with the left parties like Labour and the Progressives and Greens. One with conservative parties like National and United Future, one with the liberal party (ACt alone) and one with authoritarians like Peters. Maori would be hard to place until they are in office a bit but I suspect they would be more authoritarian than anything else. They love socialism and seem to be moral conservatives.
Vote:September 20th, 2005 at 9:23 pm
Looking at the specials, the following scenario seems the only realistic hope for “the right” (I’m assuming the greens make it over 5%):
Vote:1) National gets a couple of a percent more special votes than Labour – thereby making a Labour MP the 120th MP at risk. (Nats can’t really hope to actually pick up an extra MP)
2) The Maori party gets about 3.5% of the specials, qualifying for a 3rd proportionally allocated MP. Labour loses its 50th MP, Nandor misses out on his return ticket, but Maori party don’t get pick up a 5th MP (the overhang just reduces to one). Parliament is now 121 MPs and Act+Nats+UF+NZ1st is a bare majority.
September 20th, 2005 at 9:54 pm
Aaron
Vote:There is a difference between a deliberate gerrymander such as the Maori seats which distorts our proportional system, and a the electoral college in the US which while unneccessary is a fair system because there is no built in bias and the advantage can fall either way
September 20th, 2005 at 10:08 pm
Emmess
What? the US or Aussie electoral systems – especially in both senates & presidential college – have clear biases towards low population rural conservative states and against the large population urban states. Both countries senates have conservative majorities for this reason. But of course when this benefits the right its not a gerrymander, it’s some historial traditional fairness thing.
As it is, I look forwards to the right running the gerrymander line for all it is worth, running referenda, etc. I doubt either Hide or Brash has the courage to boycott parliament thought. And I’m afraid “mainstream” New Zealand will just decide you are all – sore losers.
Vote:September 20th, 2005 at 10:33 pm
As Sinner pointed the US electoral college has a bias, as every State has the same number of electoral votes as its Senators and representatives. Each State has only 2 senators no matter what the population and has a minimum of 1 Congressman, again no matter the population.
The remainder of congress is allocated by population.
As well the electors are not bound to vote for their pleged candidate, this hasnt effected the final result but concievably could.
Some states apportion their votes to the candidates , but most have a winner takes all. This leads to Gore having a majority of votes , but Bush having a majority of electoral votes.
The 6 least popular states had 21 votes amoung them, which was the same as Florida, but had a population of 3 million compared to Floridas over 9 million voters.
The US system is the worst of all possible combinations, and if it wasnt explicitly mentioned in the constitution would have been banned years ago as unfair in that it doesnt allow each vote to have equal value
Vote:September 20th, 2005 at 11:00 pm
The difference between the US system and the Maori seats is that the bias can fall either way. For example in 1960 the popular vote was a virtual dead heat but JFK got a large majority in the electoral college, it just a vagury of the system. Here the Maori seats are a definite bias to the left. Look I don’t think the electoral college is a necessary or a good idea but at least they are not undemocratic and racist like the Maori seats.
Vote:September 20th, 2005 at 11:22 pm
Emmess, the Maori seats are not a deliberate gerrymander (in fact they are not even a gerrymander at all – the electoral population of each Maori seat is the same (with a few percent +/-) as the electoral population of general seats.
Overhang (which has caused the disproportionality you claim is undemocratic) can occur just as easily in a general electorate – political scientists were hoping to see it (and came very close) at each of the MMP elections with either Peter Dunne, or Jim Anderton (both of whom represent general electorates). It didn’t happen, but it very easily could have. You’ll find that the Wigram electorate has a left bias too (and the Oharui-Belmont a right). There were briefly concerns that there might be a Labour overhang at the last election with Labour picking up so many so-called “National seats” (that concern changed to one (also unfulfilled) that either Michael Cullen or Jonathon Hunt (both list-only candidates) might miss miss out).
Overhang can work either way, just like the electoral college. There are many reasons to abolish the Maori seats – this isn’t one of them.
John M – that was my thinking too – don’t think it very likely, but it’s the last best hope for a Don Brash prime ministership
Vote:September 21st, 2005 at 12:03 am
No the population of the Maori seats is much lower than the general seats about 30000 as opposed to 42000
Vote:The Maori seats are calculated on the number of adult Maori not Maori on the Maori roll as (if accepting they exist) they should
I have been discussing this here
http://groups.msn.com/XtraNewsCommunity2/general.msnw?action=get_message&mview=0&ID_Message=90357&LastModified=4675540043585535340
September 21st, 2005 at 12:34 am
If green stay about the same and lab goes up say 0.3 and nats go down say 0.3
Vote:lab has 3 more seats than nat
wishful thinking I suppose!
September 21st, 2005 at 12:40 am
It’s a gerrymander. With Clark being the NZ equivalent of Joh BP.
Vote:September 21st, 2005 at 2:38 am
Justin :
The four-cornered political spectrum doesn’t work quite like that. You have your left-right (economic) access, and your up-down (freedoms) axis.
Winsome is (according to me) laterally in the middle, but below the line (authoritarian). Dunne is centre-right, also below the bar (moral conservative = against personal freedoms). National is further right, arguably not quite so far down, but still below the bar. Labour is left, slightly above the bar. (JAP is slightly below it).
ACT are alone in the top-right quadrant, and the Greens are alone at upper left.
Vote:September 21st, 2005 at 2:50 am
To establish a gerrymander, you need to show that it was set up intentionally.
The original gerrymander, of course, was to give the Maoris an apartheid-style token representation in an overwhelmingly Pakeha parliament, when they were still numerically in the majority.
So if it’s now working the opposite way, there is a certain historical irony in it.
So, what is the alleged gerrymander?
* The Maori seats themselves? Well, they certainly came in handy when NZF swept the board and handed them on a plate to Shipley…
* The current overhang? This is by design in the MMP system; its use in combination with the reserved Maori seats is a special case that nobody thought of, most likely. Did the MP deliberately game the system, or were they hoping for a higher party vote? Dunno. Is it worth correcting? Dunno.
There are other ways to game the overhang : for example, well-known Labour or National MPs could resign from their party before the election, and be elected as independents.
Vote:September 21st, 2005 at 6:28 am
Justin, I agree with quite a bit of your analysis of NZ First, I agree that they aren’t necessarily ‘centre-right’.
Vote:Talking of 2 political axises/axses? I recommend you and Alastair and others here checking out http://www.politicalcompass.org if you haven’t already. It has precisely this style of analysis of all the parties in parliament.
NZ First and National aren’t as close in views as one might think.
September 21st, 2005 at 7:34 am
Justin: “I more disagree about the idea that the Winston First Party is somehow in the centre-right. They are authoritarian to the core and more socialist than free market and more socially authoritarian than liberal”
Damn right. Part of their economic policy (not that anybody reads policies these days) were very much 1970s NZ: “import substitution” and all. In major respects it was quite some way over to the left, much more so than Labour’s.
Cheers,
Vote:RB
September 21st, 2005 at 9:37 am
It can very difficult to align parties on the freedoms access. On my reading at least, Labour falls well below the line because although socially relatively liberal, it is economically authoritarian as regards economic freedoams. Similarly the Greens are way below the line, strongly authoritarian on their command economy ideas. This dimension is not fully captured in the economic “left-right” dimension.
Graeme, you need to acknowledge that you are quite wrong about the Maori seats and their populations. Those seats are created on the basis of the total “maori” population, and yet are voted on only by those who chose to register on the Maori roll. If virtually all Maori registered on that roll this would be correct, but as it is one could imagine a scenario where there were 7 Maori seats and 7 voters.
NZF is a good example of the difficulty of compartmentalising political parties. NZF does not fit comfortably in the 4 quadrant analysis scheme, and nor do its voters.
Vote:September 21st, 2005 at 9:55 am
Alistair,
Independants don’t create overhang (instead they reduce the number of lists seats given out).
Emmess,
You might be discussing it somewhere else, but that doesn’t make you any less wrong (sorry is this coming close to a “flame” – it’s not supposed to be).
I know you’ve used this site:
http://www.elections.org.nz/electorates/reviewing_electorates.html
to back up your assertions, but a simple (re-)reading of it should show you how you have misinterpretted it.
The South Island general electorate population quota is 54308;
The North Island general electorate population quota is 54288;
The Maori Electorate Population quota is 53130.
Now there are differences, but they are minor. The numbers you of course need to look at are the following:
The South Island general electorate population is 868923;
The North Island general electorate population is 2497249;
The Maori electorate population is 371913.
Add these up and you get somewhere just under 3.8 million, which I understand would be about the population of New Zealand at the last census. You will note that at the census the number of Maori in the country was 671696 – only 371913 of these people were actually used to determine Maori electoral boundaries.
Emmess, think about it. There are 69 electorate seats in the New Zealand Parliament, 7 of these are Maori (that’s just over 10%). However at the last census Maori made up 17.97% of the New Zealand population. Why aren’t there 12 Maori seats (which there would be if what you were saying was correct)? Well, because Maori who are on the general roll aren’t counted.
What you ought to remember is that electoral boundaries are not drawn so that there is a similar number of registered voters in each electorate, but are drawn so there is a similar population in each electorate (MPs also represent those too young to vote). This is the primary reason why the numbers of people voting in Maori electorates is so much lower – Maori as a group are much younger than non-Maori, so whilst the total population of seat is approximately the same, the percentage of people in that population elgible to vote is much lower (the other reason for the lower numbers voting in Maori seats is that, as a rule, a lesser proprition of Maori on the Maori roll actually vote).
As an aside: you will note that this actually disadvantages Maori. Maori may make up nearly 18% of the population, yet the relative youth of their population means Maori form a significantly smaller proportion of the population that can actually vote. This means that when the all-important party vote is counted, your average Maori has less of a say, than your average Maori (this “anomaly” of course has no connection with the existence of the Maori seats).
Vote:September 21st, 2005 at 10:09 am
Seriously, how often do I do that?
the final sentence should say:
Vote:“your average Maori has less of a say, than your average NON-Maori”
September 21st, 2005 at 11:20 am
Alistair… The gerrymander WAS set up intentionally. The system creates a small number of seats for a special purpose, knowing that a special purpose party that targets just those seats will create an overhang. There are no other special purpose seats in NZ, only those for Maori.
Vote: