The Phoney War in NZ politics

In my last post I wrote about how MMP is the world's worst electoral system, but I have to concede that it has one positive attribute (which NotPC points out in this post on Winston Peters) that following every election there is a period of no-government (well, strictly speaking, 'caretaker' government) while the political parties jostle and negotiate to form a coalition. During this political equivalent of the Phoney War, the Wellington political establishment is in a stalemate and no decisions are made on anything of consequence, and that is a very good thing.

The New Zealand Parliament at any time has five hundred pieces of legislation in the pipeline from conception to royal assent. It is a relentless sausage machine that spits out laws that affect all of our lives, often in significant and negative ways. The sheer volume of legislation going through the machine at any time defies belief and no one could seriously argue that all five hundred bills currently in the works are critically important to the functioning of our society. Anything that slows down such a relentless machine cannot be a bad thing.

We need to constrain the ability of our governments to pass legislation. New Zealand has no upper house (having abolished it in 1951) or other constitutional checks on the ability of the House of Representatives to make laws. I have written before about how I like the Texas approach, where the legislature meets for no more than 90 days every two years, which means it simply doesn't have the time to pass too much legislation and has to be very selective in which laws it passes. This is surely one of the reasons Texas has been one of the few success stories in a moribund American economy in recent years.

I hope the coalition negotiations surpass in length those after the 1996 election, which took more than two months. In fact, if those involved could draw out the negotiations for about three years, the country would be much better for it.