Nau mai, haere mai.

There have been times recently when one could be forgiven for thinking the P in MMP stands for paradox. As Richard Shaw writes today, after three years of Labour enjoying an outright parliamentary majority but acting like a minority government, New Zealand now has three-party coalition very ready to use its numerical advantage.

This tendency has seen it pass legislation under parliamentary urgency more than any previous MMP government, instigate fast-track consenting legislation to bypass normal resource management processes, and begin cuts to public sector job numbers that will diminish the capacity of the public service “to speak truth to executive power”.

Shaw argues this is not at all how MMP was intended to work. After successive Labour and National administrations tested voter tolerance under the old first-past-the-post system, it was thought changing the electoral system “would bring the curtain down on an era of executive overreach”.

It seems there is nothing inherent within the MMP model to achieve that, however. Circumventing democratic checks and balances in the name of efficiency, and centralising executive power, are as possible now as they ever were, given the right electoral landscape.

And it comes with plenty of risk, too. “MMP was designed to strike a better equilibrium between government and the governed,” Shaw writes. “Losing that balance would contribute to the kinds of democratic erosion being seen elsewhere in the world.”