4mo ago

Hypothetically, what could we do to our political system to foster cross-party policy?

I'm wanting to see more well-rounded policy that can be supported by the major parties regardless of 'who floated it', hoping for better enduring government rather than this 'rip and replace' bullshit.

Obviously with the right wong think tanks invading, this is nothing more than a thought exercise, but i reckon its worth exploring.

My heretical angle is significantly reducing thenterms that parties have in power - not extending to 4 years but instead reducing to 1 or 18 months. The thinking being: If you cant get anything done because the only work one is interested in doing is ideological nonsense that caters to a narrow part of society maybe it shouldn't get off the ground in the first place?

31 comments

There is an old saying "if you want to paint the perfect picture, make yourself perfect and paint naturally".
We aren't going to achieve any of your goals until and unless we decide to become a cohesive society with common goals. Unfortunately that's never going to happen. Right wing forces deployed all over the world are also here fanning the flames of racism, sexism, and bigotry while amplifying every wedge issue then can find so that they can dismantle the state and privatise everything they can into the hands of the oligarchs.
The only way to fight this is by education and solidarity and unions.
That's just a pipe dream though. New Zealand can't even agree that our tax dollars should be spent on feeding our kids in schools and making us healthy when we are sick and injured and helping us out when we lose our jobs.
- We could do something, like banning algorithmic social media. I don't think banning the platforms would fly, but getting rid of the echo chambers and filter bubbles, this would go a long way to reducing the polarization in society.
  Ban money in politics, only individual people can donate, capped at $500 per year. No political adverts from non-political parties. All donations to be on the public record.
  
  I don't think you can do either though. You have no control over what facebook or xitter does. Also you could ban donations but you can't ban independent expenditures or promises of high paying jobs after the stint is over.
- Quality rant - love it and keep it up
We need to somehow disincentivise the current polarising where it becomes an us and them think. The left vs right. Boomers vs Millennials. The woke vs the... asleep?
At the moment, the divisive politics drives people to anger at the "others" and this gets people voting for their party of choice. It's also a cornerstone of social media engagement, which I think is not unrelated.This divisiveness and means parties increasingly need to slide away from the centre to find more votes instead of having a big pool of people in the centre with many choices to vote for and parties actively trying to get votes from this pool.
I like the idea of parties that can pick and choose good policies without worrying about how it looks - e.g. Labour not adopting a good policy because it was proposed by National and so it would make Labour look like it was pandering to National voters. Our MMP system actually allows for a solution to this, where smaller parties can cherry pick good policies and campaign on them. I would argue that the Radical Centre is a representation of this.
I think shortening terms to 12-18 months would be bad. National came in, ran parliament under urgency for 100 days to pass a bunch of laws and rip out a bunch of laws the previous government brought in. Is this going to be the new standard, where successive governments just rip out the laws of the previous government? In my view reducing the term in government will just lead to faster turn around on repealing the previous government's laws unless we fix the system that got us here.
I think we need to reduce the threshold to get parties into government. Avoid situations where Winnie gets to tell the big parties what to do under threat of leaving the coalition. Every election should have multiple possible coalitions.
I'd also accept a ranked choice voting system where people who want to vote for smaller parties can do so without worrying about wasting their vote.
- I'm definitely in favour of ditching the 5% threshold, and i'd also be happy reducing the ratio of electorate:list MPs too (probably by increasing the size of the house).
  I would also prefer all political party funding to be provided solely by the state and to ban private money from political parties entirely.
  
  If we ditch the 5% threshold, the lowest you can go is the "natural" threshold. If we stuck with a 120 seat house that is ~0.83%.
  You then either ignore the votes that were for parties below the threshold; or change the voting system to STV or similar.
  I would be in favor of dropping the 5% to say 2-2.5% and bringing in some form of ranked choice, along with lowering the voting age. All this with upping (significantly) the civics education in schools, to get more people voting.
  
  I don't think the threshold should be removed completely. The electoral review from way back that no government ever did anything with recommended 4%. I think 3% would be OK too, but any lower and parliament wouldn't get any work done because it would be full of conspiracy theorists.
  Using a ranked voting system may let us keep the 5%, my goal would be to get more parties into government so the small parties didn't get crazy amounts of power.
  I would love political party funding to be state funded, but for this to be effective we need to do something about political organisations that are separate from the party. That Act/National supporters can just donate to the Taxpayers Union then the TU goes and does a bunch of political campaigning, that's a serious flaw in the donation reporting requirements.
- Bicameral legislature .
  One with elected MP. These represent local interests
  Second for the party vote. 100 mps. One for each percentage of the vote they gather.
  Then an advisory panel representing workers. Every sector of the economy chooses a representative to sit on the panel. They can come and go.
  
  I admit I have never understood how bicameral parliaments operate. In this proposal of yours, how does a law get passed? Who proposes it, who votes on it, how do the two level interact?
  And for the advisory panel, if each sector of the economy chooses a representative, how does that work? Does Fonterra put in a representative for the dairy industry? That doesn't seem like the way to represent workers, but I'm not sure there are any unions representing dairy farmers since they are almost entirely small family owned companies. Who decides whether potato growers get a seat or if it's just one seat for agriculture? How does this panel interact formerly with the law making process?
Theres no legal way to fix this system.
Only money can choose who gains power, and power only chooses to benefit money.
- Touché
The issue with that suggestion is, it takes much less time to throw out what the last government was doing than to actually do something yourself.
The best way to stop "rip and replace" is to stop fucking up, in my view. The ferry project is a classic example, set to be over a billion dollars over budget, and the boats are only 550 mil each, and the boats were absolute monsters, far bigger than we needed.
Three waters is another example, if Labour had dropped the co-governance aspect, the project would likely have gone ahead without too much controversy, but they pushed ahead with a wildly unpopular proposal, and it was a big part of why they lost the election.
- the only reason co governance was controversial is because farmers are too greedy and the population is too racist.
- The problem with not fucking up is we have two conflicting ideologiea (or, a bit different if we're gettig technical), so one man's trash policy is anothers treasure. How can that be anythibg other than a fuck up?
  
  One person's trash policy is not another's treasure, sometimes it's simply a failure.
Ironically, “running the country like a business”.
Have policy outline an objective, Set KPIs, thresholds, etc. If the policy fails to meet them it gets automatically canned. Otherwise it’s safe.
Want to lower road deaths, that is your policy “lower road deaths by 2030 by 10%”. (Largely) A goal everyone can get behind.
But you’ve got to specify how you measure it, allow all parties to add their own metrics like “average journey time must not increase by 5%” or “maintain 99% licensing in rural communities”.
How you achieve the policy is (mostly) irrelevant. Want to do it by lowering speed? Fine. But that might increase journey time significantly. You could improve driver training, but that might impact rural communities.
Subsequent governments could cancel it, but only if it’s failing its KPIs, or if their new policy is “don’t lower road deaths” or “make cars go faster”
- Sounds like the interpetation of statistics becomes a very subjective game.
  Any metric that becomes a target, ceases to be a useful metric and all that

31 comments