A DEMOCRACY THAT IS NEITHER REPRESENTATIVE NOR DEMOCRATIC

The Government's proposed electoral law change will disenfranchise a large swathe of voters, but an even larger number of people have already been disenfranchised by a representative democracy that is neither representative nor democratic.

 

IT MUST be acutely uncomfortable for the Government that its own Attorney General, Judith Collins, has advised that its proposed electoral change is in breach of the Bill of the Rights. In a report that the Government did its best to keep from public view, the Attorney General says that as many as 100,000 people may be directly or indirectly disenfranchised by rules banning enrolment in the final thirteen days before an election. Young people, and areas with larger Maori, Asian and Pasifika communities, are likely to be worst affected. They are not communities that are likely to provide the National Party or its electoral allies, Act and New Zealand First, with a lot of votes.

It's not a coincidence that this exercise in voter suppression — for that is what it is — comes at a time when the Government's re-election is by no means certain. Indeed, if the loud booing that Prime Minister Christopher Luxon was subjected to at the netball last weekend is any indication, the coalition Government may, potentially, be on the skids. So the temptation to 'screw the scrum' appears to have been a temptation too great to resist.  And, for all their big claims about protecting New Zealand's democracy, neither Act nor New Zealand First have raised any objections to the law change. Act leader David Seymour has dismissed the potentially disenfranchised as 'dropkicks'. Seymour's anti-working class politics have come into full view.

But the furore over this exercise in voter suppression should not be viewed in isolation and out of context. It comes at a time when our parliamentary parties have, over time, suppressed the votes of over half a million people. They are the people, and I'm among them, who no longer vote because we do not believe that voting makes any great difference in our lives.  For over four decades the behaviour of New Zealand governments, of whatever political flavour, have only enforced the view that voting has little to do with the way real decisions are made in this country. Four decades of relentless neoliberal rule have hardly been a glowing advertisement for New Zealand's so-called 'representative democracy'.

In 2020 some 670,000 voters stayed away from the polling booths. This occurred in the same decade when the two general elections in 2011 and 2014 saw the lowest and second-lowest voter turnout recorded since the introduction of universal suffrage in 1893. That prompted the Electoral Commission in 2014 to comment that ‘New Zealand has a serious problem with declining voter participation’.

In the 2020 general election, 655,094 enrolled electors did not cast a vote, representing 18.46% of the electoral roll. In the 2023 general election, the number of non-voters rose to 829,396, equivalent to 22.49% of those enrolled. 

While the opposition parties are protesting the Government's electoral law change, they too have been representatives of an electoral system that is hostile to real change — or even a genuine contest. And as US socialist congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has observed, we risk democracy when we allow 'the continued sophisticated takeover of our democratic systems in order to turn them into undemocratic systems.' 

As I wrote back in 2020 'the hyper concentration of wealth in the hands of the few has corrupted and overwhelmed our 'representative democracy' to such an extent that it will do nothing to upset the economic and political interests of the one percent'.

The Green Party have launched a petition demanding that the Government abandon the Electoral Amendment Bill. If this feels like a rearguard action, that's because it is. But a necessary one. But the real battle must be to overturn a neoliberal capitalism that denies us our political and economic rights and forge a real democracy.