The problem with MMP is Luxon, not MMP

The RNZ headline today.

A Prime Minister who can't manage his own coalition wants voters to fix his problem for him.

  Christopher Luxon spent Thursday morning on Newstalk ZB telling the country MMP needs a “check-in”. If re-elected, he says, he will hold a referendum on the voting system, alongside another on extending the parliamentary term to four years. He wants no more “yahoos and numpties” from other parties around the Cabinet table — his words, not mine, about the coalition partners who put him in office.

  It is worth remembering that National only dropped the four-year term referendum from this term’s legislative programme in February, when it was inconvenient. Now, five months out from an election, it is back — stapled to a shiny new MMP referendum, timed for maximum distraction from a government sliding in the polls.

That is not constitutional reflection. That is a policy bonfire, restocked.

  Even his own coalition partners were not consulted.

ACT leader David Seymour says Luxon “may not have thought through what he’s saying”, given how many of his own ministers National has had to stand down this term.

Winston Peters calls it an “inexplicable” “power grab”.

Labour’s Chris Hipkins makes the sharper point: New Zealanders decisively backed MMP in the 2011 referendum, 58 per cent to 42, and any dissatisfaction now is down to Luxon’s leadership, not the system he operates under.

  Hipkins is right.

MMP did not force National to run a revolving door between the Beehive, the Taxpayers’ Union, and the lobbying firms staffed by former ministerial advisers on both sides of the same issues.

MMP did not write the rules that let a single donor funnel $242,237 to National as an anonymous loan in the first quarter of this year alone, or that let the party bank a record $10.4 million war chest in the last election year, some of it returned only after journalists started asking questions about who was behind it.

That is not MMP’s doing. That is National’s choice.

MMP forces parties to negotiate in the open. National’s problem is everything it prefers to do in the dark.

  New Zealand has now recorded four consecutive years of decline on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, a ten per cent drop overall, with the watchdog naming the “lack of transparency around lobbying and political donations” as a driver.

Public trust has followed the same line: the Edelman Trust Barometer now shows New Zealand in outright distrust territory for the first time in twenty-five years of measurement, with trust in government down to 45 per cent.

That did not happen because of proportional representation. It happened because a government elected on promises of delivery has instead delivered u-turns, donor secrecy and a Prime Minister who blames the wiring for his own failure to hold the plug in.

The public should be asking why National has such an aversion to an independent anti-corruption agency, instead preferring to have oversight over who to target, and who to condone?

  This is also a government fluent in the dead cat.

It was only weeks ago that ACT rolled out Paul Henry as a star candidate on the very day its former party president pleaded guilty to further sex offending.

National’s coalition partners have mastered distraction as governing strategy.

An MMP referendum, dropped and revived on cue, is the Prime Minister borrowing the same trick — not to fix a broken electoral system, but to change the subject from a government that cannot explain who funds it, why its ministers keep resigning, or why it stands for so little beyond staying in office.

  MMP is not why business confidence is fragile, or why voters no longer believe the system works for them rather than for the people who write the cheques.

National’s donor networks, its dirty-politics instincts and its complete absence of a consistent policy platform are the actual drivers of that uncertainty.

Luxon wants a referendum on the voting system. New Zealanders would be better served by one on his party’s funding.

  Because look at what National’s actual policy programme amounts to.

It keeps voters addicted to property speculation, restoring full mortgage interest deductibility for landlords and cutting the brightline test back to two years, so that owning a house remains a better investment strategy than building a business. And when the housing market cools, their only strategy is to fast track housing developments for their mates, cut red tape that provided safeguards, and the turn on the immigration tap.

It keeps a chunk of the electorate dependent on handouts and a chunk of the business sector dependent on protectionist subsidy schemes and endless regulatory tinkering — then Luxon has the audacity to lecture business owners for exactly that dependency, telling a Rotorua Business Chamber audience they had a “parent-child mentality” and looked to Government too often for help.

Then, days later, he apologised, conceding he “got that wrong.”

He didn’t get it wrong. He let the cat out of the bag, then apologised for the fact that voters heard him.

If Christopher Luxon wants to check in on whether New Zealanders still want what they voted for, he could start closer to home — and ask whether they still want him.