Last Straw

There are a myriad of reas­ons I hope you don’t vote National this Sat­urday, such as their record on selling off the coun­try or their keen­ness to send Kiwi kids off to get killed in illegal wars to curry favour, but if there’s just one reason it’s this: our democracy.

National wants to take away one of the things I’m most proud of about our coun­try, our pro­por­tional elect­oral sys­tem, MMP.

“Rep­res­ent­at­ive demo­cracy,” to my eyes, is a con­tra­dic­tion in terms and one day I hope we put this little step­ping stone behind us and move onto the greener pas­tures of par­ti­cip­at­ory demo­cracy, but in the mean time a rep­res­ent­at­ive one is what we have and the move to MMP has made it enorm­ously more effect­ive as a demo­cracy and given many more people a right­ful say in the run­ning of the country.

It’s some­thing to be proud of and some­thing I’ve really missed while liv­ing here in Bri­tain. I have no doubt that if Bri­tain and the U.S. had pro­por­tional vot­ing sys­tems, such as MMP, the Bush/Blair gang would never have been able to launch a war of aggres­sion — the “supreme war crime” — against Iraq. And they may even have avoided the dereg­u­la­tion that led to the credit crunch.

If National gets their way we’ll go back to an undemo­cratic sys­tem where people who man­age to gain power in parties like Labour and National can impose their nar­row agen­das on the rest of us at our expense. All the other really import­ant things such as the eco­nomy, the envir­on­ment and peace will cease to be mat­ters up for debate. This is why the mat­ter of demo­cracy is so important.

You know what to do. Keep New Zea­l­and demo­cracy safe on Sat­urday, vote for some­body else.