Brash and Mowbray’s call to split National’s vote is a fool’s errand – Liam Hehir
Liam Hehir is a Palmerston North-based lawyer and a National Party member and former activist. This opinion piece is republished from Hehir’s Substack with his permission. You can read more of his work here.
One of the best turns of phrase in the English language is “too clever by half”: a scheme so sure of itself, and so complicated, that it blows up in the face of the schemer.
That is exactly what comes to mind when contemplating the thinking of former National Party leader Don Brash, businessman Nick Mowbray and his father Harry and other assorted rightists telling National voters to split their vote this year. Keep the National electorate candidate, they say, and give your party vote to Act or New Zealand First. If enough of us do it, then the centre-right gets an overhang through the vagaries of MMP and the coalition has a better shot at staying in government.
The argument is superficially appealing (even ingenious) for people invested in preventing the left from winning, but who couldn’t care less about the interests of the National Party in particular. But it is so practically unsound that it’s just as likely to torpedo the right as it is to save it. It depends on tens of thousands of people hearing the same instruction, understanding it and executing it with almost no mistakes.
The key point to bear in mind is that New Zealanders do not, as a whole, have a good understanding of the electoral system. After 30 years, the electorate still does not understand the mechanics of MMP. That has shown up in survey after survey. The most recent one I can find, from the New Zealand Initiative in 2020, had only 46% knowing both ways a party gets into Parliament.
If you doubt it, ask the non-political junkies around you whether the party vote or the candidate vote matters more for who governs.
I’m not having a go at Kiwis in particular, by the way. We all get to participate in a mass vote to elect Parliament once every three years. Each ballot cast has a mere shadow of a sliver of influence on the outcome. And, quite reasonably, the months leading up to polling day is the only time most people have more than passing thoughts about politics.
Nor should they. It is not rational for happy and well-adjusted people to spend their time learning a fairly involved system when there are so many other things they could be doing. Economists call that rational ignorance.
Time is the ultimate scarce good. In the absence of a particular interest or passion for the political scene, there are a thousand better uses for that scarce time than boning up on the results the Sainte-Lague method may produce under different conditions. Most people learn enough to indicate a broad preference at the general election and then stop there.
The overhang plan assumes all of that is wrong. It assumes that tens of thousands of voters can be given the same instruction, hear it correctly and split their votes in precisely the intended way. This is a complete fantasy.
To everyone insisting it could be done without the real risk of it backfiring, I can only urge that they go outside, touch grass and then talk to people out there in the real world. Some of the National supporters they talk to will have heard the message as permission to abandon National altogether. Others will simply misapply the Epsom logic they are more familiar with by party voting National and giving their electorate vote to an Act or NZ First candidate.
But what about Te Pāti Māori? It has sometimes ended up with an overhang from the Māori seats (though not at every election). But the situations are not comparable. The party is a defined, separate part of the electorate with very low levels of turnout. And until this year, the party was not really trying to engineer overhangs. It just happened in 2005 in part because of genuinely divided loyalties.
That does not mean what TPM is trying to do this year is fine. The point is that you cannot just will the same result into existence on the general roll. The Māori seat overhang is not the result of a nationwide major party thinning its own party vote just enough to manufacture extra seats (without also dropping enough electorates to wreck the whole idea).
National has 43 electorate seats at the moment, which is a lot. Some were tight, however and, given the general swing against Labour last election, some are bound to go. Banks Peninsula was won by 396 votes. New Lynn was 1013. West Coast-Tasman 1017. Hutt South 1332. Mt Roskill 1564. Labour was second in all five. All things being equal, National would be expected to lose them this year.
So that is five down. What about the next tier? Let’s take Maungakiekie, Hamilton East and West, Northland, Ōtaki. The margins there might be big enough to survive the general swing, but it may be a near thing in some cases. There may be a sharpened effect in seats such as Whanganui where, for example, NZ First candidates have traditionally polled well.
In 2023 there was no national call for vote splitting on the right. Despite that, more than 5% of National Party voters gave their electorate vote to Act. Almost another per cent went to NZ First. Brash and Mowbray now want tens of thousands more voters to move, which will inevitably result in an increased “error rate” where the wrong splits happen.
This will not be the main reason that the second tier of electorates may fall. Labour is climbing from 27% towards 30 and National is falling from 38 towards 30. That will do most of the work to reduce the margins. A garbled vote-splitting campaign may end up being the last shove over the cliff, however.
Let’s say National gets down to 35 seats. Where is your overhang then? Instead of gaming the system, you’ve just helped Labour win more seats.
And NZ First too, by the way. They also get more seats out of this. And while it’s true that New Zealand First leader Winston Peters may say that his party has absolutely no intention of making Labour leader Chris Hipkins prime minister again, anyone treating that as some kind of political bank cheque forfeits any right to claim a sophisticated understanding of New Zealand politics.
Taking it all in, “too clever by half” is the kind description. A better phrase may be that it’s a fool’s errand; all to try to engineer a credibility-damaging, constitutionally poisonous result that, even if it works, will lead the left to respond in kind at the next election.
None of which is cost-free, given the shortness of time before the next election and the finite levels of attention and energy that the public is willing to expend on political matters. The right would be better off focusing on the fact that, if Labour wins, it has promised to implement a capital gains tax.
Why on Earth would you want to take your eyes off the ball like that?
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