From 1853 until 1993, New Zealanders participating in national elections cast their vote under a First Past the Post (FPP) system, in which each voter chose their preferred candidate for the electorate they lived in. The “winner” of the election was the party that won the most electorates, even if they had not gotten a majority of the vote on a national level. There has been a consistent feeling in Aotearoa that FPP led to a government that strangled smaller parties and was not representative of the people. In 1887, a bill was put forward to institute a Single Transferable Vote (STV) system, where each person votes in the form of a ranked ballot. From 1908 to 1913, candidates had to get over 50 percent of the vote in their electorate to be elected. In their 1916 founding constitution, the Labour Party advocated for proportional representation, but this facet of their platform was quietly phased out when they started becoming successful under FPP in the 1930s.
Anger towards the electoral system reached a boiling point when the National Party won the 1978 and 1981 general elections despite winning less of the overall vote than Labour. In these two elections, the Social Credit Party also won a relatively high proportion of the vote (16.1 percent and 20.7 percent respectively), yet only got one or two seats in parliament. The majority of the country was living under a government they hadn’t voted for. After feeling the unfairness of FPP in the late 70s and early 80s, Labour reverted to a weak position on proportional representation and ran for the 1984 election under a campaign that proposed a commission on electoral reform if they got elected. Labour won the 1984 general election, prompting a governmental investigation into electoral reform. In December 1986, the Report of the Royal Commission on the Electoral System was submitted to the governor-general.
Although many see this report as the beginning of Mixed-Member Proportional (MMP) elections, activists had been advocating for change since before its release. The Electoral Reform Coalition (ERC) was formed in June 1986, six months before the release of the report. Furthermore, the Labour government only advocated for this reform because of public pressure. The ERC engaged in tireless activism based around making electoral reform a major election issue. By the middle of 1987 the ERC had “a mailing list of just under 1000 supporters and [. . .] a strong central core of activists”. The group was made up of people from a wide variety of political backgrounds, from Labour Party members to Socialists, which served to maximise their organising core, but also meant they were limited to less radical actions. However, they did have some major successes. One former member says that:
Our biggest success was getting a question put to Prime Minister David Lange on a televised leaders’ debate [. . .] he promised that if he was elected there would be a binding referendum on MMP. Sometime after the election he claimed he had misread his briefing notes, but by then it was too late.
In the campaign for the 1990 general election, electoral reform was so popular that both National and Labour promised a referendum if they got in. Neither party was enthusiastic about it (Labour had won both the 1984 and 1987 elections under FPP, and had swung back to a negative stance on electoral reform), but the die had been cast, and both parties saw that not promising some reform was a losing strategy. National won the election, and kept their promise, but did so by dragging their feet: they held a pre-referendum in 1992 and a referendum proper the following year. This ensured that the 1993 election would be held under the FPP system even if reform went through. The referendum passed in conjunction with the FPP election of the National Party for a second term on 6 November 1993.
Those advocating for electoral reform and MMP wanted a government that was more representative of people’s needs. Their activism shows that we can win reforms under capitalism that improve our democratic rights. MMP, though better than FPP, cannot truly change society: no reform can. What we need for true democratic freedom is revolutionary socialism.
Banner image: Campaign materials for and against instituting MMP in New Zealand. Six pamphlets, three for MMP (“Women and MMP”, “Vote for a better Future”, “Why you should vote for MMP”) and three against (“More MPs, More Costs”, “Tick the top box, Reject MMP”, “Am I mad or are the proposed electoral changes just plain stupid???”) (Office of the Clerk/Parliamentary Service, CC BY 4.0)
