DENIAL OF REAL CHOICE

Sue Bradford says that she's unlikely to vote in 2020...

ON MONDAY NIGHT's Q+A interviewer Jack Tame was clearly taken aback when studio guest Sue Bradford, reacting to the latest Colmar Brunton poll , said that they she would not be voting for any of the parties on offer. Tame was further startled when she said that she hadn't voted in 2017 either.

Sue's not alone in her views. At the last election nearly 800,000  people (including me) didn't vote because we just didn't like what was on offer. It wasn't because we were 'apathetic' or 'irresponsible' but because we know the system is rigged against us. It doesn't matter what box we pick we still end up getting the booby prize.

While opinion polls give the mainstream media and the blogosphere something to talk about-endlessly- for many of us they are largely irrelevant. Who cares that National are on 45 percent and Labour are on 43 percent when they are both offering a diet of the same neoliberal gruel? Are we supposed to be interested? Engaged ? Really?

There have been many 'solutions' offered to what the Electoral Commission described in 2017 as New Zealand's 'serious problem with declining voter participation.' They have ranged from on-line voting to school classes in 'civic education' to lowering the voting age to 16. But these 'solutions' all treat the symptoms of an underlying problem and that problem is that New Zealand's representative democracy, like elsewhere in the world, has failed. It is neither representative or democratic. The calls for political engagement are missing the point: we have little to vote for in this country other than more market driven polices and more austerity capitalism.

Our representative democracy has been captured by corporate interests and lobbyists while there has been a convergence of policies between all the parliamentary parties and the subsequent denial of any real choices for the potential voter.

In May 2017 Sue Bradford wrote that we were facing yet another general election 'in which no parliamentary party seriously champions a future which will start to move us beyond capitalism and the legacies of colonisation.' It'll be the same in 2020.