Waka jumpers: Rod Donald and Jeanette Fitzsimons at the Green Party Campaign Launch in 2005. Photo: Dean Purcell/Getty Images

PoliticsFebruary 5, 2018

My old party is betraying its own proud history on the waka-jumping bill

Sue Bradford

Guest writer

Waka jumpers: Rod Donald and Jeanette Fitzsimons at the Green Party Campaign Launch in 2005. Photo: Dean Purcell/Getty Images

If the Green Party leadership continues to undermine its hard-won integrity in supporting the Winston Peters driven law around disillusioned MPs, they could lose a number of their more thoughtful members and supporters, argues former Green MP Sue Bradford

Last week the Electoral (Integrity) Bill passed its first reading in parliament with the support of Labour, NZ First and the Green Party. If this bill becomes law, any MP who leaves their party during their three-year term will no longer be a member of parliament. In the case of an electorate MP a byelection will be called. For list MPs the next person on the party list will come through.

What’s wrong with this, you might say?

A lot, if you have any sense of history and of the underpinning purpose of MMP. When it was established in 1996 MMP promised much greater diversity in parliament than first past the post (FPP), a system in which, basically, a one-party dictatorship was exercised for each three-year term. Under FPP many people’s votes ended up not counting at all if their party couldn’t secure a constituency seat.

The latest waka-jumping bill is driven by Winston Peters. Five out of 17 NZ First MPs jumped ship in the late 1990s and he fears a repeat. I’d suggest that perhaps he should look at his own management style and candidate selection processes again rather than doggedly pursuing legislative means to stop defectors.

During the second reading of the Electoral Integrity Bill (2001), then Green Party Co-Leader Rod Donald asked why the Labour-Alliance government was depending on Winston Peters to ‘”impose the most draconian, obnoxious, anti-democratic, insulting piece of legislation ever inflicted on this parliament”.

The 2001 bill did become law, but had a sunset clause which meant it ran out in 2005, when parliament got to debate it again. With a new balance of parties in parliament it failed this time round, after the Green Party stood firm in opposing legislation which proposed, in Rod’s words, to “stifle democracy”.

Some 13 years later waka-jumping legislation is back on the table, once again driven up by Winston Peters, and backed by a Labour Party dependent on his party for power. The strangest thing is that this time around eight Green Party MPs have also offered up their votes in favour.

There are always going to be occasions when sitting MPs choose to leave because they have a profound disagreement with where their party is going. One of the best examples of this was the late Jim Anderton. The party which he thought held deeply-felt, traditional Labour values became a tool of rightwing businessmen in the 1980s. He left, using his parliamentary resources to underpin the building of the New Labour Party.

Hone Harawira did the same thing in 2011 when he left the Māori Party over its relationship with National, quickly proceeding to set up the Mana Party.

It is very difficult in Aotearoa New Zealand to set up new political parties as recent efforts by several very rich men have demonstrated. The resources of even one sitting MP give a new organisation at least the chance of growth and survival, especially given MMP’s current 5% threshold.

At the moment it is virtually impossible for a new party to break through from nothing to the required 5% unless there is at least one sitting MP among the ranks.

And what about list MPs? What are their choices? For most list MPs who leave their party, winning an electorate seat is simply not an option. Unless they do a dodgy deal like ACT, small parties without a sitting MP tend to have no chance of winning an electorate.

Apart from higher resourcing for their electorate work, in every other respect list and electorate MPs have the same rights and powers to do their job in parliament.

Waka jumping legislation reduces the power of list MPs, deliberately relegating them to a second rate category.

Each list MP validly represent the interests of a certain proportion of voters. For a list MP to seek a refreshed mandate they can only turn to supporters who are scattered through the country. There is no independent mechanism for doing this. The solution becomes to set up a new party and work to build a substantive voting base from that.

Jeanette Fitzsimons and Rod Donald were Alliance MPs when they were first elected in 1996, but left the Alliance as part of the Greens’ formal withdrawal from that party. As sitting MPs they led the Greens into the 1999 election, using parliamentary resources to establish for the first time an independent Green presence in parliament.

Now we have the disturbing sight of their successors flying in the face of their own party’s history and policy as they vote for the latest electoral “integrity” bill.

The Greens really need to get a grip on what being part of a government coalition requires. There is a basic rule of negotiation: don’t give stuff away if you don’t need to.

In sacrificing principle on electoral law they’re gaining no advantage at all. They’re also running a high risk of being seen as nothing but a Labour/NZ First doormat for the next three years.

The Greens don’t have much time left in which to make it clear they are still able to carve out their own identity within a three-way government. Their bedrock 5-6% support will collapse if they simply focus on playing nothing but nice with Labour and NZF in return for a few ministerial posts and a small selection of reformist policy gains.

In sharp contrast NZ First voted wholesale against Chloe Swarbrick’s medicinal cannabis bill this week. Winston and friends don’t give a damn about keeping their partners happy. The Greens just cave.

If the Green Party leadership continues to reject their own proud history and hard-won integrity, they may lose a number of their more thoughtful members and supporters. With their support sitting at just above the 5% cutoff point, this is a risk they can ill afford.

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PoliticsFebruary 3, 2018

Jacinda Ardern in her own words: the Spinoff interview offcuts

Toby Manhire

Editor-at-large

Earlier this week the Spinoff visited the prime minister at her Auckland home for a wide-ranging interview. So wide-ranging, not all of it made the cut. Below, Jacinda Ardern on Winston Peters, the arts, sexism in politics, Auckland, and Donald Trump

Jacinda Ardern on working with Winston Peters

“It had always been said to me, of those who worked with NZ First from 2005 and 2008, when I wasn’t present [as a Labour staffer], I’d left by then, that the relationship was strong, there was a really strong principle of being really respectful of one another as parties, and that made for a really successful support party arrangement, I have found that to be absolutely true.

“We get on really well. I think because, you know, in the way that I run my political relationships, I’m quite old fashioned. I like to be very open, inclusive and respectful. And I’d like to think that both my confidence and supply and coalition partners would hopefully see that.”

On finding ways to measure child poverty and the rest

“I’m spending a bit of time working on that now. The last government used better public service targets. But they were very, very specific, very focused. In our view they didn’t quite get to the core issues. So the example I always use is rheumatic fever, rather than looking at overcrowded housing and child poverty rates. Places like Canada have used dashboards, often of general government priorities and then marked off whether or not they’re achieving them on their own measure. OECD have gone in and done regional assessments of how we fare across things like access to the internet, our educational outcomes. And then there’s the work we’re doing on our living standards framework. So taking it as a whole I’m trying to think about ways that we can build much broader accountability measures that also talk about our wellbeing as a nation, that aren’t piecemeal, that really give us a sense of how we’re tracking environmentally, socially, economically. That piece of work is taking a little bit of time, I don’t want it to take too long.

“Treasury has a role to play. But for the child poverty measure, for instance, we’ve already figured out how we’re going to do it. There are international measures, with the exception of one, that we have to build a little bit, around persistent poverty. Mostly we have a framework to get that data, in the household Income Survey. So we’ve said, OK ,we’ve got a way of doing it. We’re going to measure it annually, report on it as part of the Public Finance Act, and set targets and set a strategy to deliver on it. And we’ll make ourselves accountable.”

On expectations in the arts community from their new minister

“I know they’ll have absolutely no question around our commitment and dedication. And I know, because I’ve heard them say it, they also understand the pressures that we’re under. And we’ve been really clear right off the bat that the things that we’ll prioritise really early on were things like our incomes package. I know there’s huge support for that. But it does create flow-on limitations.

“There is a little mix of things that we can do. But the budget is going to be pretty constrained, because we basically poured a huge amount into education and into families and incomes. I can be really honest that there’s no way to tighten their belts in the arts community. There’s just not. They run on the smell of an oil rag. Having said that of course, I support the finance minister in what he’s undertaking.”

On Auckland as a crucible to measure Labour’s success or failure

“There’s no doubt we talked a lot about the infrastructure deficit. The problem with infrastructure deficits is the time they take to correct. So I’ll be looking for ways that we can deal with probably one of one of the most obvious signs of failure, and that is homelessness.

“There are some short term options there. They’re not as ideal as the long term, but I’ve said to the team, look our Build programme is going to take a while. We’ve got to think about how we can create relief as quickly as we can. I imagine we’ll be measure on that. And whether or not people see that you’ve made inroads on some of those bigger things, like rail to the airport, how far along are we from kicking that project off?”

On sexism in politics

“Relative to what I’ve seen elsewhere, I feel grateful in comparison. When I look at Australia, or the UK, or the United States, I feel relatively positive about our progress. But not complacent. Probably my concern is that if we take politics as a pure marker of our progress generally, we’re probably a bit off the mark. We’re not always the same.

“We’re one slice of society and I hear stories all the time that make me think we’ve still got a way to go … The worst sexism I ever experienced was not as a politician, but as a new grad in a job.”

On Trump, and how she’d deal with a hypothetical request for a visit to NZ

“In the same way we do with anyone who requests a visit. I’ve got to make sure that we continue to further New Zealand’s interests. That’s my job and that’s what we’ll do … We’ve got to keep a relationship with the United States. No one will be under any doubt about where my politics sit on that. Regardless of who visits, no one will think that’s changed, either.”

Read the full interview: ‘No room for doubt that I can do this’ – the Spinoff meets Jacinda Ardern