The fix is in

Mike Ward has succumbed to the pressure and has agreed to refuse his place in Parliament so Russel Norman can use taxpayer funded resources to campaign.

I blogged a couple of weeks ago that the Greens were trying to do two things – both of which work sit badly with me. The first is having MPs resign before for their term in Parliament is up, purely for tactical partisan reasons. You rejuvenate a party at elections, not between them.

The second is changing the order of the list post election. The Greens put a lot of stress on the fact their members rank the list, yet they have ignored the will of their members who ranked the 2005 party list – the only one which the public have had a chance to vote on with their party vote.

There is no way one can stop an MP resigning early, but one could have a simple law change to remove the ability for a list candidate to refuse to become an MP. They could still be elected and then resign, but that extra step might stop them from doing private deals to change the effective order of a list post-election.