Guyon Espiner on Luxon’s MMP woes: Our political culture, not the system, is broken

Opinion: As Christopher Luxon laments the divisive distraction of David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill, he has taken to blaming the electoral system for the pickle he finds himself in.

“We’re in an MMP environment; that’s the system that New Zealand has voted for, and we have to operate within that,” Luxon said recently, explaining why he will provide life support for the Bill to select committee stage, then euthanise it.

Luxon’s conundrum neatly encapsulates the trouble we’ve got ourselves into with MMP, which will celebrate its 30th birthday at the next election.

The electoral system itself is fine. The diversity of representation and the voice it has given to previously marginalised voters make it superior, in my view, to the First-Past-the-Post (FPP) system that preceded it.

It’s not the rules of the game that need to change but the way the players are playing the game. The culture of MMP needs to change, otherwise it will seriously hold the country back.

The first problem stems from our inability to leave behind the rigid left-right division of the adversarial FPP system. We may have ditched the Labour-National duopoly of FPP, but the left and right blocs remain: the Greens and Te Pāti Māori will work only with Labour and Act only with National.

Often that leaves Winston Peters to play a game of arbitrage in the middle, playing the blocs off against each other before allowing the most generous suitor to occupy the Treasury benches. We haven’t had an MMP election without Peters (who has been part of four MMP governments), so much of our MMP experience has been a game of “who will he go with” and “what does he want”?

Our political leaders should be encouraged – maybe even forced – to be open to negotiations with all parties, as they seek to form a government after an election. They should not rule out working with other parties, as is common today. That would reduce the leverage of minor parties, but it would also develop a culture of forming cross-party relationships.

If National, as the largest party after the 2023 election, could have turned to the Greens and/or Te Pāti Māori, Luxon wouldn’t be spending valuable political capital fighting culture wars over Crown-Māori relations.