Read the original article in the Post
A week after election day, voters are finding it hard to shake off a sense of unease about how the campaign played out. And they shouldn’t just be uneasy – they should be deeply disturbed.
The election’s most obviously distasteful element was the attempt by both left and right to engineer extra ‘overhang’ seats, attacking MMP’s core principle that contestants should get only as many seats as the public has – in the party vote – said they should have.
National won fewer votes than Labour but may have six more seats, while Te Pāti Māori got five times as many MPs as its party vote merited. The right’s overhang is currently seven seats, the left’s four.
Might this have happened organically? Maybe. Both parties’ support had tanked before the overhang-engineering campaigns took flight.
But, as The Post’s Henry Cooke pointed out, right-wing vote-splitting in swing seats like Maungakiekie occurred at three times the levels seen last election. And Te Pāti Māori returned just one-fifth of its 2023 vote. The overhang campaigns plausibly had an effect.
That, in turn, raises the unpleasant question of big money in politics – particularly on the right.
Consider the wealthy entrepreneur Harry Mowbray, whose children are the Zuru billionaires. Currently the subject of a police investigation into whether his overhang-engineering campaign breached the Electoral Act and advertising rules, Mowbray wants to remove MMP entirely because in part he thinks it gives too much power to female swing voters who vote “emotionally”.
Mowbray also offered the Greens $200,000 if they could provide evidence that humans cause climate change, even though the science on this point is irrefutable.
So we have a very rich man, distorting our electoral system, while working with ultra-wealthy figures to get rid of it entirely. Mowbray’s proposed replacement, the ‘supplementary member’ system (first-past-the-post with a tiny top-up of list seats), would be wildly unrepresentative of what voters actually want, would hand the major parties disproportionate power, and was rejected by 95% of the electorate back in 1992.
Indeed the echoes of the failed 1990s campaign against MMP, led by ultra-wealthy business interests like Telecom chairman Peter Shirtcliffe, are unmistakeable. A two-party system dominated by business interests served those people well, and they want it back.
With Mowbray, though, one at least knows where the money originates. The same can’t be said for Reality Check Radio (RCR), an outfit that also sponsored overhang-engineering adverts.
As an NGO attempting to influence the election – a so-called third-party promoter – RCR faces spending limits, as do political parties. But unlike political parties, which have to tell us the names of everyone who gives them over $6000, third-party promoters can keep their donors secret.
We have no full picture of who is backing RCR’s campaign, and who stands to benefit. This is a huge loophole in electoral law that needs closing urgently (albeit the policy options are complex). That’s especially true if Opportunity gets its way and caps donations to political parties at $10,000 a year: some of that money will flow to third-party promoters instead.
At the moment, of course, it goes directly to the parties – and mostly to the right. This year, RNZ reports, right-wing parties have scored big-money donations worth over $6m, more than three times the $1.7m the left-wing parties raised.
Four-tenths of this dosh came from just 10 ultra-wealthy individuals, Harry Mowbray’s son Nick among them. (Can it be right that one family has such influence over the election?) Smaller donations, not disclosed until next year, may have partly redressed the imbalance – but not by that much, judging from past contests.
And while money won’t save a calamitously bad campaign, it can tip the scales in a tight election. Research by academics Julia Cagé and Edgard Dewitte shows that in countries like France and Britain, higher spending consistently improves candidates’ vote share.
This election has also been marred by National’s disgraceful decision to bar people from enrolling two weeks before polling day, a policy with no justification whatsoever. The Electoral Commission has repeatedly made it clear the change will not, as ministers claimed, speed up the count.
While the effects of this voter suppression are impossible to measure precisely, enrolment was around 40,000 lower than it would have been at 2023 enrolment rates, and the final turnout is projected to be the second lowest ever.
Whatever the ultimate result, this will have been an election of small margins. So it is possible that National’s voter suppression, combined with the right’s avalanche of big-money donations, dark-money campaigns and engineered overhangs, has swung the result.
We may have just experienced an election where the government won not because it had the best arguments but because it had the most money and was most successful in cynically distorting the process. This possibility, striking at the heart of our supposed democratic equality, is something that should alarm us all.