Electoral Reform committee  I think it's a fair question. I think it depends on the party size. What tends to happen with PR, whether it's single transferable vote or MMP, rather than trying to squeeze everybody into two parties and then hoping that the result reflects what people are looking for, you do ha

Electoral Reform committee  I'm afraid I don't have any information about the actual party membership of the existing parties. I suspect that they continue to decrease, as they have been. Although other factors came in when one of the major parties decided to have an election for the leadership of the membe

Electoral Reform committee  I think it's a summary of what the issues are. New Zealand is a single chamber. It's a unicameral Parliament. There is no upper house. There are no states or provinces. There are three official languages, and Parliament must engage in those languages. I can understand that the

Electoral Reform committee  That's correct. Many stand for re-election, just as any other member of Parliament would, and the law requires parties to conduct democratic processes for the assembling of the list.

Electoral Reform committee  It would be possible. It would be a matter for that member of Parliament and for their party and the size of the party in terms of where they were trying to use their resources around the country. I think that would be a matter for what the party thought was the best way to use i

Electoral Reform committee  This was considered to be an area of huge interest when the system first started, because people were obviously used to having single-member constituency MPs only and then, suddenly, all these list MPs arrived and there was, I think in the early days, quite a strong feeling of cl

Electoral Reform committee  That's a very accurate description of what has happened. If there had been a referendum at the end of the first Parliament of PR, I suspect it would have been thrown out because there was such an upheaval and so many things happened in that single first term that were counterintu

Electoral Reform committee  There are two good examples of this. On the one hand, what's gone is the surprise policies, policies coming out of nowhere and being enforced on the public with no real parliamentary scrutiny because it's one large, single-party majority government. There is much more signalling

Electoral Reform committee  Sure. I think what's happened is that the politicians and the parties have just made it work. As I was saying before, there's no serious party that says, “Let's upend this and go back to first past the post.” Recently, it was the 20th anniversary of the system coming in. I under

Electoral Reform committee  It's a transition. The first term was a little untidy, as we might say, as the transition took place. There were arguments about how the ballot paper was structured, but these teething problems all get resolved. I think the biggest thing, from a political class point of view, is

Electoral Reform committee  Sure. I think there's a high level of co-operation amongst parties at the parliamentary level, and that's a very good thing. Some of the hyper-adversarial nature and also the secrecy—“We're in power; we'll hold all information”—has diminished significantly. I'm not going to say i

Electoral Reform committee  I think it does. The larger parties obviously want to try to maximize their vote so that they can form a government and have as much influence in that government as possible, which is an entirely rational thing to want to do. But they also look to make sure that their message and

Electoral Reform committee  I think that's a very interesting way of looking at it. Because of the stage of the process here at the moment, by definition, you're looking at structures and statistics, how it would all work, and what it would all mean. That's an important thing to do, but in terms of the Ne

Electoral Reform committee  I think it's a central challenge for all democracies that fewer and fewer voters are showing up. You're right in that with the initial election there was a lot of excitement, a lot of information about a new system, and there were many voters casting a vote for the first time in

Electoral Reform committee  The notion that just one thing would control voter turnout would not be correct, as there are so many factors. In some of those 1980s results there was tremendous anger, which I spoke of earlier. It's a big motivation to vote if you're angry about the way things are going. In som