I suppose it was inevitable, given the specific government that resulted from the post-electoral bargaining in New Zealand, that opinion polling would reveal some discontent with the MMP system. (Thanks to Eurela for the tip.)

47.2% of respondents say the system worked badly, and only 38.4% said it worked well. (14.5% don’t know/no response.)

Discontent is rather natural, given three aspects of the results:

—National was by far the largest gainer over 2002, yet is out of government, while the three parties that will share ministerial posts with Labour all declined from 2002 to 2005.

—Labour explicitly promised to form a government with the Greens, but allowed two other smaller parties (including one with half the seats of the Greens) to veto this governing formula.

—Winston Peters, a maverick populist who could not even retain his long-held constituency seat, was granted a key ministerial post (Foreign Minister), even though he had promised to support a government without seeking “the baubles of office.”

While discontent is natural, there are no obvious governing arrangements that would have been better at reflecting what New Zealanders voted for. The three center-left parties (Labour, Progressive, and Green), could not form a government because they lacked the seats to do so. That opened the way for the small center-right parties to demand the exclusion of the Greens on grounds that voters had not endorsed a narrow left government (which they indeed had not). At that point, Labour could have held firm to its pre-election commitments, at cost of probably seeing United Future and Peters’s NZ First make a deal to support a National-led government.

(My view is that Labour should have let National form a government, gone into opposition but committed not to let it fall if it followed a non-radical policy direction, and then fought for the idea of a Labour-Green coalition in 2008. But they did not ask me and most likely would not have appreciated my advice.)

Apart from being led by the second largest party and by a leader much less popular personally than Labour PM Clark, a National-led government would have needed four small support parties, and also would have required a breaking of a pre-election commitment. In this case the broken commitment would have been National’s stated intention to abolish the special constituencies for Maoris. Four of those seats were won by a new Maori party (at the expense of Labour), and this party would have been needed to sustain a National-led coalition. Despite the conflict over the Maori seats issue, such a government appears to have been close to being formed days before Labour announced its deal, and the threat of a center-right government was probably why Labour offered the ministerial posts to Peters and to UF leader Dunne.

So, that leaves us with a question: Would NZ have a government more reflective of the voters’ preferences if it reverted back to the old first-past-the-post system?

Probably not. Consider the fact that the largest party (Labour) in the 2005 election, under MMP, had 41.1% of the votes. That is more than the largest party won in three of the last six elections under FPTP. Yet two of those governments (elected in 1984 and 1990, with 43% and 48% of the votes, respectively, but huge majorities of seats) pursued radical policy changes that were skewed to the benefit of the single governing party’s constituencies—thereby violating the alleged benefit of FPTP in producing centrist governance. The third government of that period to have been elected with more than 41% (in 1987) provided anything but the stable governance that is alleged to be another of FPTP’s strengths. It was the discontent of this period that opened the way for MMP to be adopted (via two successive popular referenda).

Tying all this together, I would guess that maybe around a third of the electorate wanted Labour+Green, while another comparable share wanted a clearly conservative government, but for each of these groups the actual government they got (Labour + center-right parties) has to be better than the alternative favored by the opposite third. It is a centrist governing formula that will prevent either the relatively extreme social-policy agenda of the Greens (and portions of Labour) or the deep tax cuts of National from being adopted until such time as there is a national consensus to do so.

Compromise is messy, but I would hope that New Zealanders would not have such short memories of unrepresentative governments past that they cannot see that MMP brings benefits even as it, like any electoral system, has its drawbacks.