Sir Douglas Graham on Maori seats and overhang

Sir Douglas writes in the SST about the Maori seats and how they may deliver an disproportional result:

If the Maori Party still receives only 2.1% of the party vote, it will be entitled to three seats again. But if it wins all seven of the Maori seats the overhang will be four and we would temporarily have 124. Now here’s a real problem. Let’s assume one party gets 51% of the party vote, giving it 61 of the fixed 120 seats. This would reflect the wish of the public that it should be able to govern alone. But to its horror it suddenly finds that even though it has a majority of the party vote, it doesn’t have a majority of the seats in parliament. To have that it now need 63 seats, which may make the difference between governing alone and being forced into a deal with another party.

The overhang Maori Party electorate seats would have frustrated the will of the people. In any event, with more than twice the number of seats it should have to reflect proportionality, its influence is now out of all proportion to its degree of public support.

I’ve written about this before. It is one of the reasons that I support the recommendation of the Royal Commission to abolish the seats, but in return lower the threshold for the party vote.

So let’s look at what has happened as we approach the fifth election under MMP. Today with the Maori population at about 14%, we have 22 MPs of Maori descent making up about 19% of the House. On the face of it, if the Maori seats were abolished there would be only 15 MPs of Maori descent making up 13% of the House. But with 220,000 voters moving from the Maori roll to the general roll and now voting in general electorates, we can expect political parties will increase the number of candidates of Maori descent.

I suspect after this election there may be even more Maori MPs. And nothing wrong with that – far from it. But it will raise the issue of whether you need the seats, when there is an over-representaton, not an under-representation.