Te Pāti Māori tries to defeat the point of MMP

Radio NZ reports:

Te Pāti Māori have made their election strategy clear: give us your candidate vote to get more Māori in Parliament, and give your party vote to the left bloc.

This is the first time I can recall that a parliamentary party has not campaigned for the party vote. TPM are trying to use the Māori seats to deliberately create and overhang in Parliament, so that the four parties of the left can from Government even if they receive fewer party votes than the current Government.

The whole idea of MMP is that the Government has more votes case for it, than the Opposition. It was a primary motivator behind ditching FPP.

TPM are playing with fire. Their strategy could lead to two different outcomes:

• A moral backlash to an election result where the Maori seats were used to install a Government that got fewer party votes than the Opposition. I would then expect to see National, ACT and NZ First to all campaign on a binding referendum to abolish the Maori seats. You can justify thir existence on the basis of them being seperate but equal to general seats. But when they are used to deliberately create overhang, that defence falls away.
• Parties on the right could retaliate. National could split into two parties – say “National” that campaigns for party vote only and “Community” that campaigns for electorate seats. This would give National/Community a 30 – 40 seat overhang!

I’m not the only one who thinks this is a very bad idea.I’m not the only one who thinks this is a very bad idea. Even Willie Jackson isn’t keen:

Labour’s Māori campaign chair Willie Jackson was asked yesterday if the strategy risked the legitimacy of the Māori seats in the eyes of the public. He agreed it did, as RNZ’s Lilian Hanly reported. Jackson said it threatened a backlash against the Māori seats that could lead to their abolition “when you start working the system like that.”

You better believe it.

Graeme Edgeler also writes:

But while an overhang has been created several times, two things have never happened: An overhang hasn’t changed which party got to govern, and no-one has tried to engineer an artificial overhang in order to deliberately cause a disproportionate result.

There have long been devoted party stalwarts who have argued that their political party should try to deliberately engineer an overhang by separating the MPs who can run in safe seats from the party that would contest the party vote in order to over-inflate the share of seats in parliament, but these proposals have always been rejected because MPs know voters would punish such shenanigans. Now, for the first time at this election, Te Pāti Māori appear to be indicating they may use the Māori seats to try this strategy: telling their supporters to only use their electorate votes to support the party’s candidates, while suggesting they use their party vote to support another party.

This is key – any overhangs in the past have been accidental and not changed who gets to form Government. Here TPM are proudly asserting they want to engineer an overhang, to try and get the Government out of office, even if the Government wins more party votes.

In New Zealand, this could mean a couple of things: National deciding that it’s now willing to go along with proposals from New Zealand First and ACT to get rid of the Māori seats, or parties on the right reacting by trying the same thing, running separate candidates in safe seats to create retaliatory disproportionality.

It may be ironic that the party that may end most responsible for getting rid of the Maori seats, will be Te Pati Maori.