Don't agree. It's important to keep representation of people by location, otherwise you get chumps from Auckland making decisions for Dunedinites, &c&c

Well... only if Dunedinites choose to vote for people based in Auckland etc. - I guess the problem is with party lists you don't have control over who (individually) you vote for. Having electorates actually does very little to address this anyway.

Is there anyone in favour of my suggested submission on the MMP review? I'd be keen to have this done under the Pirate Party banner if there's support for it, but if I'm just pushing my own barrow here, I'll make it as a personal submission instead.

I think a PPNZ submission is a good idea, though I wouldn't go to the trouble to involve any other parties - just more work.

I'm not too fussed about what the conclusions of the submission are, as long as the points PPNZ makes are mainly about the rights of voters* / from the voters perspective, rather than what politicians/political groups/party activists have a "right" to or "deserve" either in elections or after being elected.

* - voters meaning individually, in small groups (~1%/1MP), and in the majority. plenty of scope.

Thoughts on my draft suggestion (linked)? Other suggestions?

For my personal opinion... (i'd support a PPNZ submission regardless of whether it agrees with this)

I like what you wrote, except the MPs with no votes part.
Imo the entire 'stable govt' and 'decisive action' thing is a red herring. Arranging a stable govt and scope to act decisively where appropriate is something MPs should be responsible for after they get elected. Using it as an excuse to exclude representatives small groups of voters select is basically saying "we want to exclude you, because you disagree with us"

Is a particular "decisive action" really appropriate in a democracy if a majority of the voters don't want it? If an action is really necessary for the country, MPs shouldn't have any trouble getting an overwhelming majority of parliament in support.

Other suggestions:

rights of individual voters #1 - not be forced to play voter roulette - have one '2nd choice' vote to prevent them being completely disenfranchised if their first choice doesn't make the cut. (5%, 25000 votes, 3rd in the electorate, whatever). This also allows your vote to be a form of free expression AND choosing a collective representative. This will give a lot of people enough reason to vote or to not be disillusioned with the system.

rights of individual voters #2 - while fully open lists is very complicated and would be under-utilized, voters should have scope to 'strike out' up to two or three names from their chosen party's list. If the number of voters striking one candidate out exceeds the quotient for the 120th MP, then they are dropped to the bottom of the list, or something like that. (very unlikely for anything resembling open lists to even be considered, though)

And of course, one that the Pirate Party should be all over - the right of individual voters to have some confidence in the system, i.e. to personally scrutineer the count if they so choose. I'm not sure if it's in the scope of the review, but even if it isn't I'd like to see a PPNZ submission touch on it as a factor relevant to a decision that IS in the scope of the review. (Matt's User page is slightly relevant here)

It does seem reasonable that if the majority of parliament agrees certain civil servants or interest on foreign debt ought to be paid, then we should be able to do that in the meantime, and then nut out the details of things we don't agree on as the need arises.

There are some complicated issues to decide though, like negotiating which parties get to have what portfolios, and how much of the budget to allocate to each department, and my (vague) understanding is that, currently, these issues are essentially decided by a game of political chicken in withholding votes for confidence and supply (paying the bills). There ought to be a better way, although I don't know what it is, and I can see where the electoral commission is coming from in that this problem is going to get more difficult the more parties are required to come to an agreement to form a government.

And even if we did have a better way, (I think) this falls out of the scope of the MMP review anyway. I think the review is essentially about the formation of parliament, not about how parliament forms a government.

These ideas make sense to me (although perhaps for #2, this could be a kind of inverse approval voting--disapproval voting?--so that voters can mark as many or few as they like, and any exceeding a threshold get moved to the bottom. Granted if lots get marked then the list would have a very big 'bottom', but I'm not sure it would really be an issue.).

I'm not sure what you mean, but I suspect this all falls outside the scope of the review. The website <www.mmpreview.org.nz> isn't really very helpful here though:
Also, I think there may be a practical consideration here, in that if anyone who wants to scrutinise the vote is allowed to, we may end up with more scrutineers than can reasonably fit in a polling place.

"And even if we did have a better way, (I think) this falls out of the scope of the MMP review anyway. I think the review is essentially about the formation of parliament, not about how parliament forms a government."

That's quite well put. Problems with the latter are no excuse to mess with the former.

"Also, I think there may be a practical consideration here, in that if anyone who wants to scrutinise the vote is allowed to, we may end up with more scrutineers than can reasonably fit in a polling place."

Hell, that would be a good problem to have. If you were really worried about that, it's not much hassle to have it first come first served. I wouldn't even be opposed to public scrutineers being charged a bit of a fee to cover costs but allow anyone who's taking it seriously to still be there.

I doubt either of them would even be necessary though.

I don't think this ought to be a problem, but apparently it seems to be, at least under the current system. I don't think the Electoral Commission could recommend removing the threshold without recommending other changes, and the Electoral Commission doesn't have the authority to recommend other changes. I think we have to work within this.

Yeah, fair enough, there could be something put in place to deal with having too many scrutineers, so I guess this needn't be an issue. I still think it probably falls outside the scope of the review though.

hence "but even if it isn't I'd like to see a PPNZ submission touch on it as a factor relevant to a decision that IS in the scope of the review."

so, use the difficulty members of the public have tryng to scrutineer as a reason to not have an all-or-nothing threshold / not have too many electorate MPs / not ban list MPs contesting electorates / whatever.

It's still a good thing to point out, that *this is one of the issues with our democracy* even if we're not saying *we should fix this issue with our democracy*, which *would* be outside the scope.