Mike's Minute: The weird rules of MMP have to go

I'm not sure that MMP needed another reason to be hailed as a deeply flawed mechanism we voted for, not once, but twice.

I still argue we did it because we were too lazy to have a decent look at alternative systems way back when we were deciding we hated First Past the Post.

One of the more interesting factoids of the campaign was when James Shaw told us last week he had seen research that shows we are actually getting less knowledgeable about MMP as people are born into a system that they never really bother to study properly.

This Government, despite MMP, having been a First Past the Post operation has hardly been a shining light and one of their great failures was to not take the astonishing First Past the Post-style majority and convince more of us to come along with them.

By not doing that, the resentment that has built is the same resentment that built under Muldoon-type Governments, whereby we were merely sheep who were lucky enough to be allowed to vote once every three years.

Of all the weird rules of MMP the overhang is probably the least trouble and, in part, explainable.

But the coattailing isn't and if we were to make a change that would be it. An electorate, although important, is not so important it should drag extra seats along with it well below the 5% threshold.

The threshold also is fine. Any less and you are dealing with weirdos and the number of weirdo parties lined up this year shows you the level of crazy we could be open to.

But to take the cake is the "death of a candidate" rule and its subsequent by-election. The rule, with its extra MP and therefore a larger parliament thus disrupting the proportionality, is so stupid it defies logic and quite obviously should be changed.

Why a list MP gets installed until the by-election and then stays makes no sense.

And the fact it could decide a Government is even more bat-shit crazy.

The trouble with MMP, apart from its potentially bizarre outcomes, is it is too complicated. The sheer amount of communication I have received from people this year clearly confused about the value of their electorate vote as opposed to their party vote, is frightening.

And 99.9% of us would not have even known about the dead person rule. And there is nothing wrong with a dead person rule if the dead person rule isn't complete and utter insanity, which it is.

Which makes it not only confusing but stupid as well.

Yet an entire country could be run as the outworking of that one new entirely invented seat we don't actually need.

Go figure.

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