Luxon panics and resorts to old MMP tricks

Luxon is making announcements on the fly, without consulting with his caucus. That isn't leadership. That's panic.

Fifty years after a fringe party decided Auckland Central, the Prime Minister is reaching for the same panic Richard Prebble once rode into Parliament.

  Richard Prebble knows how a small party can decide an election without winning a seat. It happened to him. In the 1975 Muldoon landslide, Prebble held Auckland Central for Labour by a single point over National, propped up by 12.5 percent of the vote going to the Values Party, a fringe outfit few journalists took seriously until it was too late, as he recounted in the NZ Herald last week.

  Fifty years on, Prebble has turned his column inches on The Opportunities Party, and Christopher Luxon is panicking in exactly the fashion that made Prebble's own career possible.

  Prebble's argument is that if Opportunity falls short of the five percent threshold, its votes will flow through to Labour. According to a Talbot Mills/Anacta poll he cites, most of those voters previously backed National, with smaller shares from New Zealand First and ACT. It is a neat piece of political arithmetic. It also treats the threshold itself as fixed weather, rather than the man-made rule it actually is.

  I made the case back in 2013 that the five percent bar exists to protect the parties already inside Parliament, and this fortnight has supplied fresh evidence.

Luxon ruled out working with Opportunity without his own caucus knowing, then days later called for a referendum on MMP itself, again catching caucus off guard.

Winston Peters called it a power grab.

Those two captain's calls landed the same week National released a list exposing how many of its own MPs are running out of room. I have already set out why the referendum call says more about Luxon's coalition management than about MMP, so I will not relitigate the donor-secrecy case here.

  National has form eliminating minor-party threats through the electorate rather than the ballot box. In 2005 the party recruited Tauranga businessman Bob Clarkson to contest the seat held for two decades by Winston Peters. Clarkson won by 730 votes, and New Zealand First was shut out of Parliament for a term. It was not the last time a major party solved a proportional-representation problem the old-fashioned way.

  ACT's own rise carries a similar shape. David Seymour inherited the leadership in October 2014, in the wake of John Banks's scandal-shortened tenure and Jamie Whyte's brief, unsuccessful stint. He built a party in the image of the man whose old Herald column real estate he would later share. Seymour's public style has always been a poor imitation of someone else, his latest metamorphosis becoming Prebble's avatar.

A small party without a single seat has already decided one New Zealand election. Now the Prime Minister complaining another might do it again is the same one who will not say who funds his own campaign.

  The honest fix is not a captain's call ruling parties in or out, and it is not a referendum on a system Luxon's own government still needs to win under. It is removing the five percent threshold that manufactures wasted votes in the first place, paired with real transparency over who funds the campaigns telling voters which parties are safe to support. I drafted legislation years ago to do both.

Prebble beat National in 1975 because a fringe party split the very voters Luxon is now terrified of losing. If he wants a different ending this time, panicking about the rules will not help him. Reading them might.