Let’s see…on TVNZ’s Agenda programme this morning, Opposition Finance spokesperson Bill English said that there would undoubtedly be Wellington public sector and regulatory cuts if the Opposition won this year’s general election. We’re told we must tighten our belts… so why can we also afford an anti-MMP electoral reform referendum?

For that is also apparently within the Opposition’s set of proposals. Sorry, but no. We do not need what will essentially be a fifth and sixth set of electoral system referendums here.

In Germany, things are more stable. The Christian Democrats and Free Democrats on the right usually balance out the Social Democrats and Greens on the left, except under circumstances where there needs to be a ‘grand coalition’ between the CDU and SPD, as there is at the moment. Unfortunately, National is dissatisfied with New Zealand’s MMP because the centre right cannot generate a viable centre-right coalition partner for it.

Sorry, but that’s the fault of the centre-right, not a result of any failure within MMP as an electoral system.  In the case of the centre-left, it’s quite simple- Labour is the dominant centre-left party, and the Alliance (1996-2002) and then the Greens (2002- Present) have been its logical coalition partner. On the centre-right though, problems have arise. New Zealand First first went into coalition, then split apart so its fragments went into coalition with National, then recovered when National underwent its disastrous election campaign in 2002, then lost its bolthole seat Tauranga at the last general election in September 2005. As for ACT, it was always riven by its libertarian/populist neoconservative factions, and National’s recovery led to its near-demise in 2005.

Just because the centre-right can’t get its act together, is that any reason for the rest of us to subsidise a fifth and sixth series of electoral system referenda? At a time when the Opposition is criticising the current government for ‘excessive’ public sector spending, why should the rest of us subsidise this unneccessary convenience expense, even given that any such vanity plebiscite will be held in 2011?

Speaking of the Opposition finance spokesperson, he may have ruled out any further Shipley/Richardson style benefit slashing, but I’ve spotted ‘wriggle room’ for the Opposition in that statement. He did not state that the Opposition wouldn’t therefore make it much harder for anyone unfortunate enough to develop chronic and/or terminal illness to get onto the Invalids Benefit, or, once on it, face incremental payments insultingly designed to test ‘work compliance’ to see if recipients are not ‘malingering.”

And in case you’re wondering why I’m writing about this in an LGBT blog, might I note that as Pharmac and MedSafe’s pharmaceutical and regulatory systems develop approval bottlenecks from time to time, that it may well be PLWAs and/or lesbian breast cancer survivors who are exposed to these unneccessary, vexatious and stressful influences, especially when they well may have been undertaking employment as a consequence of the remission of breast cancer or AIDS? And, let’s face it, how many people are currently on Invalid’s Benefits as a result of developing long-term mental illness as a result of the National Opposition’s destructive social policies and contract-based industrial relations laws in the nineties, because they could not get work, and then suffered through cumulative lack of local social services?

If the Opposition isn’t intending that sort of punitive blame-the-victim incremental beneficiary-bashing later this year, it’d be great to have some direct confirmation- because it would throw its proposed little anti-MMP vanity referenda proposals into stark relief, wouldn’t it?

Recommended:

Ruth Laugesen: “MMP Future in doubt under National” Sunday Star Times 18.05.08:  http://www.stuff.co.nz

Alison Ravetz: “Is Labour Abolishing Illness?”New Statesman: 01.05.08: http://www.newstatesman.com/200805010024