Keith Melville

It strikes a chord with me when I see someone raising concerns about the erosion of public confidence in our democracy and appealing for the need to strengthen democratic institutions.

Jim Bennett has done just that in two separate opinion pieces in the Beacon in recent weeks.

He calls for “a return to quality democracy with open government”, but by seemingly placing all the blame for the erosion of democratic values on the governing coalition, he shows he has a selective and narrowly-focused memory, and contradicts his own argument.

Bennett has ignored or forgotten other more serious cases where democratic principles, such as accountability and transparency were sidelined for political expediency, including one recent example where officials tried to hide the true cost (about $40 million) and the extent of a bungled computer upgrade, from their ultimate boss, the minister involved.

Another shocking example occurred in Jacinda Ardern’s Labour-led Government (2017-2020) when details of a major policy shift with serious, and I mean serious, democratic and financial ramifications for all of us, was kept secret from Labour’s coalition partner, New Zealand First, and from the public, until the full plan was about to be enacted some years later.

I am talking about the so-called Three Waters reforms in which Labour was planning to remove the management of water resources, such as water supply and effluent treatment and disposal, from local bodies.

As part of that package Labour intended to establish a centralised organisation with iwi participating with a 50 percent co-governance management role with and no involvement of the ratepayers and their successors, who had established many of those water systems in the first place.

This was not a case of passing legislation under urgency, or passing legislation to set a voting enrolment cut-off date, both of which are examples Bennett provides to highlight his conviction that the National-led coalition has abused democratic rights: Instead, it involved a full-blown Labour lie to mislead the public about Labour’s Three Waters plans and to hide the detail from public scrutiny.

New Zealand First leader Winston Peters who was deputy Prime Minister in the first Ardern government said Labour withheld from him what the Three Waters reform would entail and lied about it.

If we are to win back public confidence in our democratic institutions, honesty and openness are the first priorities, not cherry-picking bad examples for a one-sided narrative to make political opponents look rotten.

One outlandishly bizarre case where public finances were spent but the details hidden from public scrutiny until the Taxpayers’ Union dug into the case, deserves a special mention.

That also happened in the Ardern years when the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment provided $4 million in taxpayer funds for a Matauranga Māori project to see whether playing recorded whale sounds to diseased kauri trees would cure them of dieback.

How could a government official, presumably with oversight from more senior officials, even countenance such a project when the outcome was going to be obvious to those of sound mind.

There has been little public discussion on this subject probably because the guilty white liberals among us would prefer to remain silent on the big no-no – race relations.

Another Labour hit job that eroded government credibility, was selectively performed against residential landlords in 2021 when the tax rules were corrupted against the advice of IRD to make landlords pay more tax, but not tax on something you would expect to pay tax on.

Normally, you and I and the business sector pay tax on income and profits.

In the case of landlords, however, they had to pretend that interest they paid to the bank was not a business cost but taxable income.

When the corrupted tax rules were removed from the statute books by the National-led coalition, this was then falsely and mischievously described by Labour supporters as the landlord tax break.

That lie was repeated endlessly by Labour for two-and-a-half years before their leader sheepishly told supporters that landlords could keep deducting interest as a business cost if Labour was re-elected.

As for passing legislation under urgency, which Bennett decries, he knows as a political junkie, as well as I do, that both the main political parties have been doing that for eons.

Referring back to the point Bennett made and I wholeheartedly agree with – the need to restore confidence in our democratic institutions; we now have an even bigger democracy-subverting event to confront and deal with – the election outcome (so far) with its huge increase in parliamentary seats (131 seats in the preliminary results) thanks to vote-splitting campaigns and the overhang.

This seems to be a blow to proportionality in our mixed member proportional (MMP) form of Government.

The centre right parties, the preliminary winners, took their cue on vote-splitting from the Māori Party, which from the early days of the campaign urged its voters to vote for its electorate candidates but to give their party votes to the Greens or Labour.

This gave Te Pati Māori five successful candidates and a four-seat overhang.

National won 42 electorate seats, all that it was proportionately entitled to, but vote splitting by its supporters created a seven-seat overhang on the right.