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The 2017 election: the morning after

elocal Magazine, ed. 199. 29 September 2017

Writing about the 2017 election on the day after that election is full of risk.  With well over 300,000 special votes still to be counted, the final composition of Parliament is yet to be determined.

But one thing we know for certain: New Zealand’s disastrous 13-year-long experiment with an ethnically-based political party has come to an end.  The Maori Party will not be part of the next Parliament, and I think that is a very positive outcome of the election.

No longer will we see the major party in Parliament having to bow to the demands of a party with just two MPs, demands which have seen legislation passed giving special constitutional rights to those who chance to have a Maori ancestor (always with non-Maori ancestors as well).  This despite Article III of the Treaty of Waitangi guaranteeing to all New Zealanders the same rights and privileges.

We don’t yet know what the shape of the next Government will be.  The two obvious coalition arrangements are National with NZ First, or Labour with NZ First and the Greens.  With special votes still to be counted, both those options are numerically possible, though the Labour-led option is only just possible, with 61 MPs out of the total of 120.  National led a Government with the support of just 61 MPs for some years, so that is certainly possible though hardly comfortable.

My betting at this stage accords with that of most other commentators, that there will be a National-NZ First coalition with a comfortable majority.  I reach that conclusion for three reasons:

• First, National is by a substantial margin the bigger of the two main contenders.  There appears to be a view that NZ First “should” therefore give National an opportunity to form a government.
• Second, it has been obvious for a considerable period that there is considerable hostility between NZ First and the Greens – and the hostility runs both ways.
• Third, one of Mr Peters’ so-called “bottom lines” in any post-election negotiations is a commitment to a binding referendum on the continued existence of the Maori electorates.  Given that National used to be committed to actually scrapping those electorates – which have been redundant since all adults got the vote in 1893 and which are totally absurd in a situation where there are now more than 20 Maori MPs in Parliament, only seven of them elected in Maori electorates – this condition should not be difficult for National to agree to.

But a Labour-led grouping is clearly not impossible.

• Labour, NZ First and the Greens are all to varying degrees “nationalist parties”, all opposing the present wording of the Trans Pacific Partnership for example.  In many policy areas, those three parties have more in common than do National and NZ First.
• Despite strong pre-election indications that Labour would never agree to a referendum on the Maori electorates, Labour’s campaign manager appears to have indicated that “nothing is off the table” in a media interview since the election.
• It would probably be easier for the experienced Mr Peters to throw his weight around in a Labour-NZ First-Greens grouping, led by the relatively inexperienced Labour leader, than it would be within a National-NZ First grouping.
• And while acknowledging the mutual antipathy between NZ First and the Greens, that could well be accommodated by leaving the Greens out of the formal coalition, as happened after the 2005 election.  Given their left-of-centre views on many issues, they would have no option than to support a Labour-NZ First minority government.
• To top it off, just as one of the reasons given for Mr Peters choosing to back Labour rather than National after the 2005 election was his irritation that National had taken his long-held electorate of Tauranga off him, so losing his Northland electorate to National might also incline him to doing a deal with Labour.

On balance, at this stage I still think NZ First will form some kind of support arrangement with National, though that may stop short of a formal coalition.

From my perspective, my main concern is that Mr Peters remains true to his often-expressed support for every New Zealander being treated equally at law.  In the first place, that means getting rid of racial preference in environmental law (as he repeatedly pledged during the long debates about the amendment to the Resource Management Act over the last two years); and giving New Zealanders an opportunity to get rid of the Maori electorates, as the Royal Commission on the Electoral System recommended 30 years ago if MMP were adopted.

A final word.  Fifteen years ago, I attended a black-tie dinner in Napier.  It was the night before the 2002 election.  Before we sat down, the host invited the local vicar to give thanks.  He stood, gave thanks for the food and drink of which we were about to partake, and then gave thanks for the fact that in 24 hours’ time the country would have elected a new Parliament – without a shot being fired, with nobody beaten to death by a mob, with the army still in its barracks.  And, he added, New Zealand is one of a terribly small number of countries of which we could say that without any hesitation.

He was right: we take it for granted, but we are indeed one of a very small number of countries where we know that elections will be free of corruption and peaceful.  Be very grateful.

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