Image: Alice Webb-Liddall

OPINIONPoliticsJanuary 18, 2021

Unpopular but true: New Zealand should have more MPs

Staff Writer

Image: Alice Webb-Liddall

The current number of members of parliament is starting to get too low for the job we expect them to do, argues Alex Braae.

As a general rule, with the possible exception of their families, nobody likes backbench MPs. But it’s nevertheless time we accepted that parliament should have more of them.

There’s no exact right size or proportion a parliament should be relative to population. In the last Israeli election, there was a 120-seat Knesset for a population of more than 9 million. By contrast, just over 2 million people are represented by the 123-seat parliament of North Macedonia. Each country is different, and has unique circumstances for this sort of thing. Some, like Britain or the US, have many more people represented by each legislator, and they manage that with mechanisms like upper houses or state assemblies.

In New Zealand, there is a case to be made that the country has changed enough to warrant an increase in the number of MPs. In 1996, the population was about 3.7 million people. It wasn’t projected to rise to 5 million as quickly as it has, nor was the expected continued increase expected. Within the next decade, Stats NZ predicts a high likelihood of it hitting 5.5 million, and possibly higher.

One of the most profoundly positive aspects of New Zealand’s political system is the access ordinary people can have to MPs. But the demands on MPs as a result are very high. While they’re frequently derided by many as lazy, incompetent, stupid, craven, petty, and other various terms of endearment, the average MP actually works quite hard at their job – even the backbenchers.

A big part of the job for MPs that aren’t ministers is around select committees. They have to scrutinise the legislation being sent through the parliamentary process, and they have to be at least reasonably informed on what they’re talking about to do that. Many MPs sit on several – to pick a few at random, Labour’s Duncan Webb and Shanan Halbert, and National’s Chris Bishop and Matt Doocey, all sit on three committees each. They each combine that with other jobs – some quite big – and mostly have electorate responsibilities too.

That work isn’t necessarily all that visible to the public either. Chris Penk, the MP for Kaipara ki Mahurangi, said a lot of backbench MP work doesn’t make headlines, but stuff like select committee preparation and constituent work is at least “theoretically valuable”.

Simon Bridges and Chris Penk cutting the ribbon on Penk’s new electorate office in the former electorate of Helensville (Image via Facebook)

“Without putting too fine a point on it, a new backbench MP whose activities haven’t made the 6 o’clock news might be doing OK.”

The hours are long and punishing. Penk said his Tuesdays during sitting weeks generally start at 5.30am to get from Auckland to Wellington, with parliamentary business then finishing up at 10pm that same night. That’s probably the upper limit of how long a day will be, but it’s a decent shift to put in. East Coast MP and minister for both conservation and emergency management Kiri Allan put together a rough calculation of her weekly hours, which came out in the range of 83-90.

“I come from a legal background. Long hours aren’t an issue. But the range of issues you need to be across is different and you can’t get into the detail like I would sometimes like to.”

And the driving necessary to get around a big electorate is another grind. Kaipara ki Mahurangi is big by Auckland standards – but an MP like Allan needs to somehow get around the East Coast electorate, which stretches from Kawerau to Gisborne and includes everything in Tairāwhiti and the eastern Bay of Plenty in between.

Allan said that means “a lot of driving and having a good team around you to make sure you have very good ears on the ground so you can respond to issues as they arise and advocate effectively for the whole electorate. I personally have a home base on each side of the electorate to enable me to be as present as I can possibly be.”

Emergency management minister Kiri Allan during the 2020 Napier flooding – probably a busier week than most (Photo: Getty Images)

One advantage of adding new electorates would be to bring some of the huge rural seats to a more reasonable size. To do that, some might have to be a bit smaller in terms of population, but that isn’t necessarily a problem for parliament as a whole, which could still be kept proportional to the party vote.

There are plenty of examples. You could drive for seven hours and not get from one end of West-Coast Tasman to the other. Taranaki-King Country includes something like 70 different towns and population centres, some of them tiny and remote, from Raglan down to just outside Stratford. The Māori electorates are bigger by far – Te Tai Tonga includes the entire South Island, a big chunk of Wellington, and the Chatham Islands for good measure.

In 1996 when the MMP system came in, the size of parliament was expanded from 99 MPs to 120. Just over 2 million valid votes were cast to elect that parliament. During the most recent election, that number of valid votes was up to 2,886,420.

This wasn’t necessarily a problem in previous parliaments, before the reforms of 1996. As a Victoria University report from last year noted, “the previous first-past-the-post system had no cap on the total number of MPs, thereby enabling the size of the House to increase if the population of the North Island rose relative to that of the South Island”. That last bit is relevant, and we’ll come back to it in a bit.

In general terms, this has one simple effect – the sheer number of people each MP represents is now far larger than it was 25 years ago. This is especially true for constituent MPs – about 10,000 more votes are now cast in each electorate compared to 1996.

And that has been true even with the number of electorate seats slowly increasing to try to keep pace with population growth. And it gets a bit technical here, but under MMP, the proportionality of parliament has to match up to the share each party wins of the party vote. As such, the number of list seats available shrinks. As the Victoria University report put it, “at some point, this process will make it increasingly difficult to keep faith with the principle of proportionality”.

The other wrinkle is the South Island. Right now, the minimum number of South Island electorates is 16 – a mechanism to ensure that the mainland (and its much lower population) doesn’t get shut out. Seats between the two islands are roughly the same size right now, but over time, unless more North Island seats are added (Hamilton, Tauranga and Whangārei are growing rapidly, not to mention Auckland), that balance will tip.

But with more MPs, won’t that just mean more weirdos being paid out of the public purse? How much do we want to spend on publicly funded weirdos anyway?

There’s a seductive appeal to that kind of argument – take the $150k or thereabouts paid to each backbencher, multiply it by however many new MPs there would be, and cost it out into the millions of dollars. But apart from the fact that “millions” isn’t a particularly big denomination when it comes to public spending, it’s pretty facile to boil down the issue of representation into one of accounting.

The new MPs would have communities and constituents, whose views they’d take into parliament. That would even be true of list MPs – part of why proportional representation works so well is that communities aren’t necessarily bound by geography. Even the lowliest Green or Act list MP has people they represent – that’s why parties put them on the list in the first place.

Increasing the size of parliament would be unlikely to be welcomed – a citizens-initiated referendum in 1999 found 80% of voters would have liked to see the number of MPs reduced. Nor would it be a catch-all panacea to making parliament and the wider electoral system work more effectively or democratically.

But sometimes politicians like to think of themselves as people who will make unpopular decisions in the public interest. This is one such idea that could do with some champions taking it up.

Keep going!

Health minister Chris Hipkins speaks to media alongside director general of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield. (Photo: Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)

PoliticsJanuary 15, 2021

Pressure mounts on government to accelerate Covid vaccine roll-out

Justin Giovannetti

Contributing writer

Health minister Chris Hipkins speaks to media alongside director general of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield. (Photo: Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)

More infectious variants of Covid-19 are increasingly being intercepted at the country’s borders, but the minister running New Zealand’s response is resisting pressure to accelerate vaccination plans despite demands from health experts as well as political friends and foes, Justin Giovannetti reports.

New Zealand’s first Covid-19 jabs will be administered in April to border workers – that’s the plan and Chris Hipkins is sticking to it. That timetable, already one of the most protracted in the world, could be further delayed if health regulator Medsafe doesn’t grant approval for one of the vaccines purchased by government.

The Labour government’s decision to wait on the roll-out puts it at odds with the rest of parliament. The Greens, National and Act have asked the government to move quicker and begin a vaccination campaign sooner. Today the Māori Party added its voice, with co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer writing on The Spinoff today that she had “come to the view that we need to the follow the example of Australia, the European Union, Canada, Mexico and Chile and bring forward the vaccine schedule to start earlier than planned”. She added: “I am calling on the government to do everything they can … to start offering vaccinations to MIQ staff and high-risk groups as soon as possible. They need to be fully transparent and release the vaccination schedule.”

The calls come as the virus worsens by the day around the globe, with deepening lockdowns and unprecedented waves of deaths. Based on the government’s current plan, tens of millions of people abroad will already have been inoculated before any New Zealander.

Hipkins, the Covid-19 response minister, says the longer schedule is needed to allow the government to plan the largest vaccination campaign in the country’s history. Thousands of health professionals will be trained to deliver jabs, new ultra cold freezers will be installed and doses will be transported and ready to go in April. No vaccines have been approved yet either.

That cautious planning may have made sense before Christmas, but it now looks complacent as the global situation deteriorates, says Nick Wilson, a professor of public health at the University of Otago. In a world where one in 30 Londoners has the virus, and a steady stream of British-based New Zealanders are returning, the country’s border staff need vaccines much sooner, he told The Spinoff.

“We need a hybrid approach: vaccinate the border workers to keep us safe and then take a more leisurely and careful approach for vaccinating everyone else. There’s no doubt we should fast-track the border workers, so that within a month they’ve all had a first dose,” he said.

Based on current infection levels, nearly every flight out of the UK will have at least one positive case on board, according to Wilson. That’s a problem when passengers will be removing their masks to eat and drink. He’s called on the government to suspend flights to the UK or quickly begin vaccinating air crews. Hipkins has rejected both requests.

Genome sequencing in returnees identified 19 cases of people with the fast-spreading B.1.1.7 variant from the UK as of Monday, along with an additional case of the even faster-spreading B.1.351 South African variant. The variants have contributed to unprecedented increases in Covid-19 cases and deaths in their respective countries.

Vaccine roll-outs across North America and Europe have been plagued by chaos and delays. The number of jabs being administered is far short of expectations and some doses have been given to low-priority people before they expire. New Zealand says it will train up 3,000 full-time vaccinators to administer doses. Most of those health professionals will be ready after July, when vaccination will be made available to the general population. The government still hasn’t decided who will get vaccinated first after border staff.

The government also doesn’t have a plan yet for what happens to returning New Zealanders vaccinated overseas and whether they can skip or limit stints in managed isolation at the border. Hipkins’ office did not make him available for an interview despite multiple requests.

With Australia now preparing to begin its vaccine roll-out in mid-February, the political pressure is mounting on the minister to move more quickly. Speaking on the Kapiti coast on Tuesday, Hipkins reiterated that he didn’t see the need to be more aggressive in setting a timetable.

Instead, he said the government has moved to require pre-departure testing as of today, first for returnees from the US and UK. The testing will be expanded to more countries as it becomes clear that returnees can get tests there. Arrivals from high-risk countries will now be required to get a test when they arrive in New Zealand, instead of waiting for three days.

Covid-19 tests being prepared for analysis in the laboratory at Whiston Hospital in Merseyside, England (Photo: Peter Byrne/PA Images via Getty Images)

However, the mutant variants stoking fear around the world shouldn’t be cause for alarm, said Hipkins. “The new strains don’t necessarily have greater consequences in terms of health. People who get sick from Covid-19 from these new strains end up with more or less the same symptoms as if they’d caught the other strains,” he told reporters.

Unlike drug regulators in North America and Europe who gave emergency approval to vaccines, New Zealand will go through a quick process, but will base it on the outcome of more clinical trials.

“They are doing that because the consequences of not vaccinating people quickly are huge for them. We don’t have that same pressure in New Zealand,” said the minister when asked why other countries have acted faster.

“When we start the vaccination campaign is, to some extent, less important than when we finish it,” he concluded.

There is no emergency use provision in New Zealand law that allows Medsafe to sidestep its approval process, according to the health ministry. Other than a full approval pathway that can take years, there is a provisional approval process which allows for certain drugs or vaccines to be approved when less than full data is available. The ministry said in an email that it expects it will need to provide provisional approval for Covid-19 vaccines.

Nikki Turner, a professor at the University of Auckland and the director of the Immunisation Advisory Centre, said the government’s current plan is sound, as long as the virus doesn’t make it through the border again. If one of the more infectious variants is detected in the community, a faster vaccine roll out will be necessary, she added.

“We are all anxious about the new variant out of the UK,” she said. “We can’t let our guard down.”

A damning report that looked into the country’s managed-isolation facilities last year found multiple issues with the long-term quarantining of Covid-positive cases in hotel rooms. The report, released publicly the Friday before Christmas Day despite having been given to government months earlier, concluded that hotels shouldn’t be used indefinitely as border facilities.

According to the government’s current timetable, managed-isolation will be necessary until mid-2022. Put another way, the Beehive thinks we’re closer to the start of the Covid pandemic than to the end of it.

The country needs a debate about the future of border facilities, especially if vaccines wait until April, says Wilson. There have already been six cases where Covid has escaped the country’s border facilities, he said. Seven, if you count the Auckland outbreak in August that killed three people and ended only after a lockdown that cost the economy hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s still unclear how the virus got into the community in that case.

Back on the question of vaccines, Turner warned caution about moving too quickly. She said the government could lose public trust if it rushes into vaccinations without allowing Medsafe proper time to look into the vaccines.

“We’re in a very privileged position where most of the world has no choice at all. While we are waiting for vaccines, no one in New Zealand is dying, no one in New Zealand is on a ventilator. There are places that need vaccines way more than us. New Zealand, ease off a bit,” she said. “We’re moving fast, we will get vaccines, we will get them authorised. It won’t be as fast as some people want, but my gosh, New Zealanders aren’t dying.”