Democracy and how we vote

The Beehive in Wellington, home of New Zealand's executive
Points of viewVoters should get a government that can govern and a Parliament that can hold it to account.

I grew up in West Germany under the electoral system New Zealand later borrowed, and I have been explaining it to New Zealanders since 2010. These are the convictions I have reached and the pieces in which I argued them.

Core beliefs

A government should be able to govern

Voters do not elect the Public Service Commissioner. They elect a government and expect it to carry out its programme. Yet New Zealand’s ministers answer to Parliament for departments whose chief executives they can neither appoint nor remove.

Germany lets ministers choose their top officials from a qualified pool and protects the career service beneath them by law. That is the model I proposed in Who Runs the Country?

Read: Who Runs the Country? (research note, 2026)

Three years is too short

In year one, ministers find out which levers connect to what. Year three belongs to the campaign. That leaves twelve months for anything ambitious, which is why every government reaches for urgency and pushes bills past the select committees.

I support a four-year term, together with a larger Parliament, a smaller Cabinet and stronger committees.

Read: New Zealand is too busy governing badly to govern well (The Australian, 2026)

What is legal is not always legitimate

The German constitutional judge Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde warned that the liberal state lives by conditions it cannot guarantee itself. Rules work only while politicians respect their spirit.

Rushing laws through under urgency, trying to entrench part of the Three Waters law or gaming the voting system may break no statute. Each of them still wears away the trust a democracy runs on.

Read: Three Waters bill, Covid fund allocation may be legal but not in spirit of democracy (The New Zealand Herald, 2022)

If New Zealand keeps MMP, it should at least be designed properly

I would still rather replace MMP. But New Zealand’s version has a flaw of its own. A party can win more electorates than its party vote covers, and the overhang rule then rewards voters who split their ticket tactically. Germany, which invented the system, faced the same flaw and rewrote its law in 2023. Here the Electoral Commission recommended a fix in 2012 and nothing happened. At the 2026 election, on the preliminary count, it produced a Parliament of 131 seats.

As long as MMP stays, my preferred remedy is balancing seats for the other parties, which would make the gaming pointless.

Read: Unravelling MMP: How the 2026 election could break the voting system from two sides (research note, 2026)

Germany is a warning as well as a model

New Zealand copied the German system but not the German experience. There, grand coalitions of the two big parties became a habit, voters drifted to the fringes and the Bundestag swelled to 736 seats. New Zealand’s stable contest between a strong government and a strong opposition is worth protecting.

Read: MMP, made in Germany (speech, 2011) and Our islands of stability (National Business Review, 2018)

How I came to this

The Germans call MMP personalisiertes Verhältniswahlrecht, two words and 35 characters. Most of them cannot explain how it works, and even the Federal Constitutional Court has struck parts of it down.

I joined New Zealand’s debate from Sydney. Before the 2011 referendum, Luke Malpass and I wrote Superseding MMP for the Centre for Independent Studies. We argued that MMP gave small parties more power than their votes warranted and blurred accountability. Our alternative was a Parliament of two chambers, with local MPs elected first past the post and a smaller Senate elected by party vote.

Voters kept MMP. I still think New Zealand would be better served by a different system. But as long as it has MMP, the system should at least be designed properly. My questions now are whether it can be kept honest and whether the governments it produces can actually govern.

  1. 1993New Zealanders vote 54 to 46 percent to replace first past the post with the German system.
  2. 2010Superseding MMP, written with Luke Malpass, proposes a Senate elected by party vote.
  3. 2011I give my speech MMP, made in Germany to the New Zealand Business Roundtable. Voters keep MMP in the referendum.
  4. 2012The Electoral Commission recommends abolishing overhang seats. The parties cannot agree, and nothing happens.
  5. 2018Our islands of stability: New Zealand’s two big parties hold while Germany’s fragment.
  6. 2022The row over entrenching part of the Three Waters law.
  7. 2023Germany abolishes overhang seats and caps the Bundestag at 630 members.
  8. 2026The government shelves the four-year term referendum. I publish Who Runs the Country? and Unravelling MMP. On the preliminary count, the election of 7 November produces a Parliament of 131 seats.

What happened next

The Senate never came. New Zealanders kept MMP in 2011 with 57.8 percent of the vote. I still think it should be replaced, but since voters chose to keep it, I have also pushed to fix its worst flaws.

The repairs are still waiting. The parties shelved the Electoral Commission’s 2012 recommendations because they could not agree, and a 2023 review made the same case without result. In February 2026, the government also shelved the referendum on a four-year term for lack of parliamentary time, although almost every party supported it.

The election of 7 November 2026 showed what that means in practice. On the preliminary count, National won 42 seats, all of them electorates, with 29.2 percent of the party vote. Labour won slightly more votes and six fewer seats. Parliament is set to have 131 members instead of 120, the most in its history. The official results are due on 27 November.

Before the election, Christopher Luxon promised a referendum on MMP itself. Until voters decide, the rules should be fixed so that nobody can game them.

Reports

Cover of Superseding MMPSuperseding MMP2010 Cover of Who Runs the Country?Who Runs the Country?2026 Cover of Unravelling MMPUnravelling MMP2026

In my own words

“An electoral system that punishes sincere voting and rewards clever voting will not stay legitimate for long.”

On launching Unravelling MMP, August 2026

“There are things politicians should never do, even if they are legal.”

The New Zealand Herald, 1 December 2022

“The most effective weapon the bureaucracy has against unwanted change is the calendar itself.”

The Australian, 31 March 2026

Watch

Does New Zealand need electoral reform?, Three News, 9 November 2026 · Watch on YouTube

Start here

Speeches · 9 September 2011

MMP, made in Germany

German constituency MPs thus also lack the degree of personal independence that we would often find in countries with a first-past-the-post system.

Everything I have written on this

Show all 37 pieces on democracy and voting

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