this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2025
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Hypothetically, what could we do to our political system to foster cross-party policy? (lemmy.nz)
submitted 2 weeks 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] 1 points 2 weeks ago (2 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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Im all about transparrnt or non-existent private funding!

Ranked voting seems oromising as well.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I just think that if enough people vote for some party that it would (absent a threshold) amount to 1 MPs worth of votes, that those people deserve representation even if its a conspiracy theorist nutter. But i'm open to ranked choice or other similar systems that are better at ensuring everybody has at least some say in who's represented in parliament.

Agree re the dark money in the TU, NZ Initiative etc. But even if we found an effective way to nullify that the same interests still own most of the media and would spread their messaging and campaigns through influence on those outlets instead.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

I just think that if enough people vote for some party that it would (absent a threshold) amount to 1 MPs worth of votes, that those people deserve representation even if its a conspiracy theorist nutter.

I imagine in such a world we would see that person thrown out of parliament on a regular basis, and using question time to ask pointless questions that don't help anyone. I am not sure of the proper procedures but on thinking about it I think if we aligned procedures with the change it may work. E.g. you get proportional time in question time based on your party's share of parliament or something. Changing the threshold to be a bit lower does sound more achievable though.

Agree re the dark money in the TU, NZ Initiative etc. But even if we found an effective way to nullify that the same interests still own most of the media and would spread their messaging and campaigns through influence on those outlets instead

Yeah, a tale as old as time. I hope humanity one day works out a solution.