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Hypothetically, what could we do to our political system to foster cross-party policy? (lemmy.nz)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm wanting to see more well-rounded policy that can be supported by the major parties regardless of 'who floated it', hoping for better enduring government rather than this 'rip and replace' bullshit.

Obviously with the right wong think tanks invading, this is nothing more than a thought exercise, but i reckon its worth exploring.

My heretical angle is significantly reducing thenterms that parties have in power - not extending to 4 years but instead reducing to 1 or 18 months. The thinking being: If you cant get anything done because the only work one is interested in doing is ideological nonsense that caters to a narrow part of society maybe it shouldn't get off the ground in the first place?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (13 children)

We need to somehow disincentivise the current polarising where it becomes an us and them think. The left vs right. Boomers vs Millennials. The woke vs the... asleep?

At the moment, the divisive politics drives people to anger at the "others" and this gets people voting for their party of choice. It's also a cornerstone of social media engagement, which I think is not unrelated.This divisiveness and means parties increasingly need to slide away from the centre to find more votes instead of having a big pool of people in the centre with many choices to vote for and parties actively trying to get votes from this pool.

I like the idea of parties that can pick and choose good policies without worrying about how it looks - e.g. Labour not adopting a good policy because it was proposed by National and so it would make Labour look like it was pandering to National voters. Our MMP system actually allows for a solution to this, where smaller parties can cherry pick good policies and campaign on them. I would argue that the Radical Centre is a representation of this.

I think shortening terms to 12-18 months would be bad. National came in, ran parliament under urgency for 100 days to pass a bunch of laws and rip out a bunch of laws the previous government brought in. Is this going to be the new standard, where successive governments just rip out the laws of the previous government? In my view reducing the term in government will just lead to faster turn around on repealing the previous government's laws unless we fix the system that got us here.

I think we need to reduce the threshold to get parties into government. Avoid situations where Winnie gets to tell the big parties what to do under threat of leaving the coalition. Every election should have multiple possible coalitions.

I'd also accept a ranked choice voting system where people who want to vote for smaller parties can do so without worrying about wasting their vote.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (5 children)

I'm definitely in favour of ditching the 5% threshold, and i'd also be happy reducing the ratio of electorate:list MPs too (probably by increasing the size of the house).

I would also prefer all political party funding to be provided solely by the state and to ban private money from political parties entirely.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I don't think the threshold should be removed completely. The electoral review from way back that no government ever did anything with recommended 4%. I think 3% would be OK too, but any lower and parliament wouldn't get any work done because it would be full of conspiracy theorists.

Using a ranked voting system may let us keep the 5%, my goal would be to get more parties into government so the small parties didn't get crazy amounts of power.

I would love political party funding to be state funded, but for this to be effective we need to do something about political organisations that are separate from the party. That Act/National supporters can just donate to the Taxpayers Union then the TU goes and does a bunch of political campaigning, that's a serious flaw in the donation reporting requirements.