Coalition government reflects a nation’s diversity. Electoral arrangements show it.

          Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

          Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

          The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

          The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

          The best lack all conviction, while the worst

          Are full of passionate intensity.

                              W. B. Yeats The Second Coming

The New Zealand Government is always a coalition of disparate interests. For its first 38 years – the first parliamentary election was in 1853 – there were no parties and the government was an unstable alliance of individuals. The 1872 Stafford Ministry lasted 31 days; the 1873 Fox Ministry lasted 36 days; the 1876 Atkinson Ministry lasted 12 days; the 1884 Stout-Vogel Ministry lasted another 12 days; followed by 6 days of the 1884 Atkinson Ministry. (Britain’s 2022 Liz Truss Ministry was 49 days from appointment to resignation – including 10 days of the national mourning period for Queen Elizabeth II.)

With the election of the Liberal Government 1891, New Zealand began party government. Even so, a number of Liberal MPs crossed the parliamentary floor to elect the Reform Government in 1912. In 1915-1919 there was a National Ministry of a coalition of Reform and Liberals. In 1930-1931 the Forbes Ministry was a minority government. His 1931-1935 ministry was a coalition between Reform and United (previously Liberals).

However, from 1935 to the arrival of MMP in 1996 there was single-party government. Since then there has been 18 years of coalition governments with the exception of the Ardern-Hipkins Government 2020-2023. All the coalitions since 1891 have been reasonably stable. Only the Shipley-Peters coalition of 1997-1998 had an untimely end.

Observe that there are broadly two kinds of coalitions. One involves more than one party having seats in Cabinet as occurred with National and New Zealand First in 1996-1998. More common has been minority single-party governments with other parties providing confidence and supply and Ministers outside Cabinet. (Between 2017 and 2020 there was a minority two-party government of Labour and NZF with the Greens providing confidence and supply and Ministers outside Cabinet.)

Coalition governments are common elsewhere. At the time of writing, Slovakia is negotiating a coalition government, with the lead party having won just 23 percent of the vote. There is talk that they may need another election soon.

Even our parties are coalitions. National is a merger of the country-based Reform Party and the urban-based Liberal Party. A way of thinking about the 1984-1990 Labour Government is that it was a coalition between the traditional Labour Party and the yet-to-be-formed ACT party in which the minority party dominated. As we ponder on what is going on in the US, we may think of the Republican Party as a coalition of traditional conservative Republicans and the extreme right. There are similar obvious, but not as public, tensions among the Democrats – they currently handle them in a more civilised way.

The reasons the tensions are not as visible in the US as they are in New Zealand (or Slovakia) is the different electoral systems. MMP does not create these tensions. It exposes them.

I puzzle over whether these tensions are greater today than they once were or whether they are just more visible. Once Māori were hidden in the countryside, women in the kitchen, homosexuals in closets. They would be much more visible today even if we did not have MMP.

Māori are an interesting example of how electoral arrangements change visibility. They were confined to four seats in 1868. National’s first Māori MP won general seats in 1975 (although James Carroll won one for the Liberals back in 1893 – he was twice acting Prime Minister, a Māori first). Even if parties are unable to win the Māori seats, under MMP they want to win as many list votes as possible and they put Māori on their lists. Today there are more than twice as many MPs of Māori descent as there are specific Māori seats.

Not all social diversity is evident in public discussion. We pretend there is no class in New Zealand. But class plays a role in both American and British politics – especially that the traditional working class sense they are being left out. It could happen in New Zealand.

(We confuse Māori with the working class, even though there are more non-Māori who belong to it. We talk of Māori as a unity. They are not. In class terms there is a Māori elite, a growing Māori bourgeoisie, and a Māori working class. There are other tensions within Māoridom which non-Māori only see dimly.)

Historically for logistic reasons, we have had electorates based on regions except Māori are separated out. If we had electorate based on all ethnicities, class, gender, income or religion, we would have a very different politics. MMP reduced the importance of regions.

One of the consequences of MMP is that political tribalism is fading. The number who vote ‘my party – right or wrong’, often with clenched teeth, seems to be diminishing. As a result the dominance of the two main parties is lessening. In the 1987 and 1990 elections Labour and National won 83 percent of the vote between them; this year they have been struggling to get 65 percent.

What has been unusual about the 2023 election was not that it will lead to a coalition government, but that the coalition negotiations have been going on in public before election day. (There were private ones between Labour and the Alliance in 1999.) It has been a bit weird really. Like everyone playing poker not knowing what cards they hold. After the election those with decent hands will play in earnest.

What struck me about the pre-election game was that every party – even minor ones – talks as if FPP still applies, as if they are going to win the election and will be able to implement their manifesto promises unconstrained by any other party. Yeah, right. Not one said much about respecting the wishes of voters. Not one set out their bottom lines which they will not negotiate nor what they were willing to negotiate. One hopes they prove better organised in the post-election negotiations.

Whatever party ‘wins’ the election, they will have been rejected by a majority of voters. That is one of the reasons we don’t like coalitions. As a rule, we prefer ones involving a minority government to a majority one consisting of representatives of two parties. 

Underneath there are questions of how to manage the diversity in the nation which MMP, among other indicators, exposes. Is there anything we all have in common other than living in the same land? (There are even around 250,000 potential voters offshore.) The centralist solution is to impose some sort of national unity – in laws and rhetoric: ‘you will bloody well follow the All Blacks’. Bugger any minorities.

We are long past that possibility although there are authoritarian regimes overseas which pursue it, often crushing (ethnic, religious and sexual) minorities. What the growing affluence has meant is choice – of lifestyle as well as what you buy on the supermarket shelf.

It seems to me that we can only hold the nation together by tolerating this diversity – the only intolerance should be towards the intolerance. We need to make tolerance of diversity a proud national characteristic. (Up you, authoritarian regimes.) That means greater decentralisation.

Yes, governments will have to take decisions with which minorities are uncomfortable, but the decisions should be in a context of respect for them. I broadly accepted our anti-Covid strategy but was uneasy about its attitude to, and treatment of, those who disagreed. (Yes, many were nutters, but they had a right to be nutters, providing they impacted minimally on others.)

It is a feature of the last seventy-odd years that the one occasion we came together politically was in the war against Covid and the rejection of the views which caused the Mosque Massacres. It won the Ardern Government a majority in parliament in 2020 – despite National winning more votes than Labour in 2017.

But the mood of tolerance over diversity was not continued. The 2023 election campaign has certainly been divisive. Top of the post-2023 Prime Minister’s list has to be promote tolerance and think more about decentralisation.

          The darkness drops again; but now I know

          That twenty centuries of stony sleep

          Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

          And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

          Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

PS. An earlier column discussed the unthinkable of a grand coalition.