Harry Mowbray Coatesville mansion summit on replacing MMP electoral system, Digi Mart USA News (Coatesville, north of Auckland, New Zealand): Once, Kim Dotcom presided over his $3.5 million anti-establishment Internet Party campaign at the vast property north of Auckland that he called the Dotcom Mansion. Footage of armed police leaping from helicopters to raid the house went around the world.
Now, the patriarch of the billionaire Mowbray family plans to kick off a very different campaign there. Harry Mowbray has been behind an advertising drive to persuade conservative voters to split their party and electorate votes to engineer an overhang for the centre-right parties.
This Saturday, he is inviting high-worth individuals and others to an election party at which he will explain the next stage to replace MMP, potentially with something similar to the supplementary member system considered by a Royal Commission in 1986. “If we don’t drive it, someone else will drive it,” he says.
For the past two weeks, Mowbray has been driving a right-wing vote-splitting campaign that is backed by ACT and NZ First, but not by National. The bigger party has complained to the Electoral Commission, which in turn has referred the matter to police.
Mowbray concedes he was in breach of the Electoral Act. To comply, he is obtaining written sign-off for his online advertising from ACT and NZ First, and will add his promoter details to the website.
To him, this week is only a step toward a bigger goal. He expects the election night party at Coatesville will mark a pivot from election campaign to electoral reform campaign.
Mowbray plans to explain the “next stage” to his guests, which will entail pushing for changes to New Zealand’s 30-year-old MMP electoral system and extending Parliamentary terms to four years.
He calls MMP flawed and says he prefers a “positive MMP” model instead. This model sounds similar to what the 1986 Royal Commission on the Electoral System called a “supplementary member” system.
Mowbray proposes 100 electorate MPs, elected under the old first-past-the-post model or single transferable vote, and an additional 20 party list MPs whose numbers would be set in proportion to how many votes their parties got.
Essentially, his preferred model would provide token representation to smaller parties. In a Parliament of 120 MPs, a party like NZ First with 10 percent support would be entitled to two seats in total, being 10 percent of the 20 supplementary seats.
Supplementary member voting was one of four electoral systems put to the public in an indicative referendum in 1992. In that referendum, MMP won 65 percent support, STV got 16 percent, preferential voting got 6 percent, and the supplementary member system got just 5 percent.
Mowbray argues, somewhat perversely, that MMP means thousands of people who vote for National with their party vote will have their votes wasted, because the list votes will not elect a single MP and those elected will all come from the electorates. Newsroom modelling suggests National could win around 42 of the country’s 71 electorates.
However, if it gets less than 30 percent of the party vote, as polls forecast, it would have an overhang of six to eight seats.
“At the moment, National does all of this work, wins all these electorates, and then they just lose list MPs,” Mowbray argues. “They just all get knocked out.
And so, the biggest travesty that this election is going to have is there’s going to be at least 870,000 National votes that are going to go to waste. Those people will not get what they voted for.”
In his interpretation, National is losing some of the MPs it is entitled to, because he thinks it should get all the electorate seats it wins as well as a share of the list MPs on top of that. He sees the supplementary member system as a “positive MMP” model in which a party that dominates the electorate vote would still receive additional list MPs.
He accepts this would not be a proportional representation system.
For Mowbray and his guests at the Coatesville mansion on Saturday night, a big overhang will be a win, regardless of who forms a government. They will see this overhang, which they have helped engineer, as discrediting MMP.
That will make it more likely Mowbray gets his wish to have New Zealand reconsider MMP as a voting system. “MMP is a dog,” he says.
“The minor parties control Parliament, and that is wrong. It’s not only the tail that’s wagging the dog, it’s the flea that’s biting the tail that’s wagging the dog.”
Hobson’s Pledge leader Dr Don Brash confirms to Newsroom that he plans to attend the Coatesville mansion event. He supports a proposal to extend the Parliamentary term to four years, subject to the caveat that select committee oversight be made more rigorous.
“But I don’t feel a strong antipathy to MMP, I must say. I voted against it in the 1993 referendum.
But I’ve got accustomed to it, and I’m not too fussed about changing it at this stage. In any case, I’m not quite sure what the alternative would be.
Certainly, I’m not committed to change unless there’s something better.”
