December 2007

Matt McCarten: Votes mat­ter, but it’s coali­tion part­ners who will count in 2008 — Despite the spin from party spokesper­sons, it is a great tru­ism that you can nor­mally pre­dict an elec­tion a year out. Con­sis­tent polls over the past year have shown that National holds a healthy lead over Labour. You can be pretty… [NZ Pol­i­tics]

Matt McCarten reck­ons that National can’t gov­ern because they won’t have a coali­tion part­ner. he is right and wrong at the same time.

The next elec­tion will show Labour espe­cially, and National gen­er­ally that Kiwi’s are fed up with the foibles of MMP, they are sick to the back teeth of tails wag­ging dogs and they will show it in cat­a­strophic fash­ion. Cat­a­strophic for the minor par­ties with the excep­tion of the Maori Party and per­haps ACT if Rod­ney can pull through.

Win­ston First is par­tic­u­larly exposed after Win­ston lost Tau­ranga and with no prospect of ever win­ning it back and the likely-hood that his sorry assed excuse of a party will fail to reach 5%. Not only that but Win­ston First is the only party that daily records its demise in the Death notices as their mem­bers pop their clogs. To make mat­ters worse, Win­ston has alien­ated a large seg­ment of his core con­stituency by sup­port­ing the Elec­toral Finance Bill.

The Greens have never had the legit­i­macy of ever win­ning an elec­torate seat and thus will be con­signed to the dustbin.

We live in inter­est­ing times, John Key could make it more inter­est­ing by promis­ing a bind­ing ref­er­en­dum on the future of MMP. The peo­ple mis­tak­enly believe that they were promised such a thing, and also mis­tak­enly believe that suc­ces­sive gov­ern­mens have not pur­sued such a path because they just aren’t inter­ested i, like the prover­bial turkey, in vot­ing for an early Christ­mas. John Key should play to that mis­taken belief and deliver to des­per­ate Kiwi’s cap­tured by sin­gle issue par­ties and sin­gle issue MP’s.