Last Straw

In a rep­res­ent­at­ive demo­cracy it’s not democracy’s pur­pose to pro­duce good gov­ern­ment but to pro­duce rep­res­ent­at­ive gov­ern­ment. While I don’t expect much in the way of demo­cracy from rep­res­ent­at­ive demo­cracy¹ enough New Zeal­anders voted against their interests on Sat­urday to elect into gov­ern­ment a mul­ti­mil­lion­aire mer­chant banker Prime Min­is­ter and his self-interested fat cat accom­plices, includ­ing some of those who wreaked havoc on the New Zea­l­and eco­nomy in the eighties and nineties. As a res­ult New Zeal­anders can expect, amongst other things, a nas­tier soci­ety, a less fair soci­ety, more crime, more prisons, lower wages, more involve­ment in futile and immoral wars, a decline in the envir­on­ment and less democracy. Garbage in, garbage out.²

As you can tell, I’m over the moon that enough New Zeal­anders had, shall we say, the con­fid­ence to vote National (and ACT!) on Sat­urday. They must have missed my memo.

1. New Zealand’s cur­rent vot­ing sys­tem requires the form­a­tion of a coali­tion rep­res­ent­ing a major­ity of voters to form a gov­ern­ment. While this is some­thing to be rel­at­ively proud of com­pared to the more com­mon sys­tem of plur­al­ity vot­ing, which requires only that a group receive the largest bloc of votes to form a gov­ern­ment, we still end up with an extremely lim­ited form of democracy.

   While there are things we could do to improve our vot­ing sys­tem, such as mov­ing away from hav­ing two large parties and get­ting rid of the absurd 5% threshold which can dis­en­frachise hun­dreds of thou­sands of voters, there’s no get­ting away from the inher­ent prob­lems of rep­res­ent­at­ive demo­cracy, such as the tyranny of simple major­ity rules (let alone plur­al­ity rules) and the fact that vot­ing for people to rep­res­ent your interests is the least effect­ive means of apply­ing polit­ical power and argu­ably a con­tra­dic­tion; no one can truly rep­res­ent your power and interests for you. You can only have power by exer­cising it and you can only truly know what your interests are by involving your­self in the attend­ance of them.

   In any case, I don’t think it’s any coin­cid­ence that the self-described demo­cra­cies of the world using plur­al­ity vot­ing sys­tems are some of the least equit­able, the largest arms deal­ers and the largest pol­luters. [↩]

2. A fam­ous com­puter axiom mean­ing that if invalid data is entered into a sys­tem, the res­ult­ing out­put will also be invalid. [↩]