DEMOCRACY: CHANGING THE SEATING ARRANGEMENTS IN PARLIAMENT

Despite the claims from our political elite and their cheerleaders that we live in a democracy, why do we still end up with governments that do little but defend the neoliberal status quo? The system is rigged and that's why, in 2023, over 770,000 people didn't vote. 

THIS IS democracy!' declared an excited Tova O'Brien, the presenter of Stuff's on-line election night coverage. Why are we a democracy, Tova? 'That's because we all get to have our say,' she explained. But O'Brien wasn't the only media pundit who was waving the flag for our 'representative democracy' on Saturday night. There were a number of other commentators, including TVNZ's John Campbell, who also rejoiced in seeing our 'democracy' in action.

But, to bastardise Shakespeare, methinks they celebrated too much. Maybe, just maybe, some of them dimly grasped that a democracy that only provides the non-choice of a corporate friendly government headed by either National or Labour, ain't much of a democracy.

But, unlike Tova O'Brien, a lot of people have already worked out that the game is rigged. They didn't vote. According to the Electoral Commission voter turnout was estimated to be 78.4 percent of those enrolled. That compared with a final 82.2 percent turnout of those enrolled in 2020. 

A total of 3,582,232 were enrolled to vote but, including special votes, just 2,811,380 voted. That was less than the number of those who voted in the pandemic impacted 2020 election. That saw a total number of votes of 2,894,486.

Despite the Electoral Commission's extensive advertising campaign aimed at encouraging people to vote, 770, 852 people decided to stay away from the polling booths. 

It's worth noting that what commentator Bryce Edwards has described as the Abstentionist  Party, came second to the National Party which attracted 875,234 votes on election night. The Abstentionist Party beat Labour into second place which received 602, 816 votes. The Green Party trailed further behind with 241,977 votes. (As an aside, what Edwards now describes as the Abstentionist Party is what I called the Did Not Vote Party several years ago.)

The only reason to vote is if it represents the ability to bring about real change. But what is represented as change in 2023 is simply new seating arrangements in Parliament.

In 1990, over thirty years ago, a well-known New Zealand politician shared his views on the state of our democracy. He observed:

'Parliament is a cringing vassal of the executive wearing a cloak of democratic artifice. It is little more than a talk-shop, a gab-fest, where politicians lurch in and out of chamber, on their way to more exacting and important tasks. Not only does a routine parliamentary session resemble feeding time at the zoo, but Government Ministers contemptuously dismiss the legislature as an annoying irrelevance.

'It is the arrogance of politicians which most infuriates the public. Not only are they excluded from decision-making, but they are treated as infantile fledglings unable to make decisions for themselves. Democracy is a concept that finds little support among politicians, even though they are dependent on it, and they resist it between elections.

'Any solution to this crisis of public confidence involves politicians sharing their power with the people. Politicians have to divest themselves of their obsessive belief that only they have the combination of intellectual will, moral fibre and access to the facts to be able to make decisions,”

The politician that offered that damning assessment of our representative democracy was none other than New Zealand First's Winston Peters.  

The problem with this view is that Peters thought we ccould rely on the benevolence of his fellow politicians to share 'power with the people'. We've seen precious little evidence of that occurring in the years since Peters made those comments. The neoliberal straitjacket that the country has been confined in for the past four decades remains firmly in place.  We effectively have a political system that postures as democratic but isn't.

Democracy does not come from the top but from below. The history of the right to vote tells us that the lower classes have had to fight their way into the political system by presenting elites with a credible revolutionary threat. The great American historian Howard Zinn noted that:

'If democracy were to be given any meaning, if it were to go beyond the limits of capitalism and nationalism, this would not come, if history were any guide, from the top. It would come through citizen's movements, educating, organising, agitating, striking, boycotting, demonstrating, threatening those in power with disruption of the stability they needed.'