For those able to do so, listening to the 15 minutes of interview from RNZ this week is worthwhile (audio link is a few paragraphs in). Otherwise RNZ’s text is an okay summary.
For me the most interesting part of this is Geoffrey Palmer’s logic for wanting more MPs in Parliament. In short, he’s arguing that we need more MPs, but a smaller Cabinet, to protect our democracy from populism and perhaps authoritarian populism. His reasoning is that most of NZ’s process relies on the government being accountable to Parliament. Back-bench MPs presently, however, are drastically overworked when it comes to being able to process and understand everything needed for effectively holding the government to account between the other work they have to do.
He thinks we need at least 150 MPs, and that the size of Cabinet should be capped at 20 to increase the ratio of back-bench MPs over Cabinet MPs. (Presently we have 120 MPs but 30 are Ministers.) It’d mean Ministers would hold more portfolios, but also that they’d not be so siloed from each other. It’d also mean that the task of understanding the complexities of legislation that goes through the House, and through Select Committees, would be shared among more MPs.
He’s also shared thoughts about Parliamentary process and the electoral system, wants better civics education, and expresses thoughts on misinformation.
For those who don’t know him, Geoffrey Palmer is a former MP and Minister known from the 1980s Labour government. He took over as Prime Minister for about a year after Lange stepped down, but left that role shortly before the 1990 election. Apart from the controversies of that government though, he’s also an obsessive legal nerd when it comes to constitutional law and Parliamentary process.
The major parties’ most closely held desire is for exactly two seats in Parliament: one each.
More seats is anathema to them as it provides opportunity for minor parties to get one.
When we introduced MMP each seat represented ~25,000 people, now each seat represents ~41,000.
So each of us has lost representation.
Yeah, the draft report from the Independent Electoral Review, to be published in November, is (if not changed) once-again recommending that Parliament’s size increases over time to keep the ratio of electorate to list seats fixed at 60:40, although in this case it’s about retaining proportionality rather than for Palmer’s point of ensuring there are enough back-benchers to properly hold Cabinet to account… and the suggested ratio wouldn’t be enough for that according to his interview. If implemented today for our 72 electorates, it’d still only give us the exact 120 seats we presently have, but it would at least increase in future.
The same 60:40 recommendation was ignored from the 2012 Electoral Commission Review (in which all recommendations were ignored), and from both 2017 and 2020 Electoral Commission post-election reports. I don’t have my hopes up on this unless there’s some kind of post-election deal with a minor party (most likely the Greens) that requires the government to implement the recommendations. Even a deal like that could be unlikely given the recommendations won’t be officially published until after the election.