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TL;DR: Swarbrick seemed to have the strongest and most well thought-out responses. Q did alright but had much less speaking time. McAnulty was about as mum as you would be in his position 2 days before this election. Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke held her own; and only one old white guy interrupted her, at least that I noticed.
Jones was pretty quiet in general. Seymour was good at politics and you can tell he’s been fencing with Swarbrick. Nicola Willis evoked the most full-room laughs when she attempting to plainly state “facts” (at least here in this room).
I’ll just put it forward for the downvotes: What would a Green / Act party look like if National / Labour continue their downward trend? You next, over the next 10 years?
Honestly I don’t think we’re headed for a Green/Act, I think National/Labour will likely continue to trend down, and will be replaced with more coalitions between 3+ parties. One thing that has plagued MMP is that we end up with a small number of parties in parliament and one small party with the power to decide who gets to govern. I’m looking forward to all the minor parties having to make concessions instead of demands.
This is because the small parties have jumped into the tribal mindset far too much; NZF and TPM used to be able to work with Nat or Lab, there is no United Future or Alliance anymore.
Last election we had FPTP with extra steps; there was a clear left/right split and no option of cross bench.
This time around Opportunity will sit in the middle and wield power beyond their vote; not a bad thing in this specific situation, but for the last ~30 years that has been NZF and Winston has made the decision who will govern.
Ideally there would be 3-4 small parties that sat in the middle who had their own interpretations of how to do things, the bigger parties could then actually have options to negotiate with. It would mean an extra week or so before government was formed, but it would stop one party holding the power.
Yeah I agree, I want there to be lots of parties and lots of options for how government can be formed so they can all negotiate policies properly.
The electoral commission has recommended that we drop the threshold from 5% to 4%, not sure if that is going to happen, but that would incentivize more smaller parties.
I thought that too, and I thought the review was multiple governments back, but it seems one was done in 2023 with a recommendation to make the threshold 3.5% and drop to coat-tails rule (parties not meeting the threshold can currently bring in list MPs “on their coat-tails” if they get one electorate. E.g you get 3% of the party vote = 3 mps but you get 0 because you don’t meet the threshold, oh but if you get 1 electorate MP now you are allowed all 3 MPs based of vote share. This change would mean you only get your electorate MP unless you meet the threshold).
Some other recommendations too, like lowering the voting age to 16: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/politics/491390/electoral-system-review-recommends-voting-age-lowered-to-16-party-threshold-to-3-point-5-percent
