I hear the NZ National Party and the NZ Herald have been fostering the idea that the party with the most votes should lead the government, even, it seems, if that party can’t form a coalition to represent the will of the majority of voters.
Suppose for a minute that we didn’t have two major parties but instead a number of small parties and the party with the most votes won 5% of the vote. What they’re actually suggesting, in a modern democracy no less, is that this party should form the government simply because it received the biggest block of votes.
This is called majoritarianism, a throw over from feudalism and a very limited form of democracy that 84.5% of voters in New Zealand elected to get rid of in 1993, when we chose the astronomically fairer system of proportional representation in MMP.
If National is incapable of co-operating with other groups in our society to form a representative majority then tough bickies. They’re a mollycoddled bunch of bloody whiners if you ask me and their long record of looking after themselves at the expense of the rest of the country should mean they never have their hands anywhere near the levers of power again.
No Right Turn has some thoughts on a recent Colmar Brunton poll on the same topic and Russell Brown responds to the Herald:
The Herald is free to make an argument that a National-led coalition of three parties would be a sounder government than a Labour-led coalition of four parties, but it should do so without making presumptions on the public will. If a majority coalition can be formed without betraying undertakings made before the election, then by definition it represents the will of the majority of voters.