Direct democracy, the political system minor parties are raving about

As the election looms, a number of minor parties are pitching policies to make changes to the current political system. Federico Magrin investigates their push for direct democracy legislation.

On October 14, those of voting age across the country will get the chance to take part in the election, casting two votes – a party vote and a candidate vote.

Once the election is over, the three-yearly cycle will begin and for most voters their involvement with politics, other than watching or reading the news or arguing about it at the dinner table, will be over until 2026.

But a number of minor parties vying for spots in Parliament argue more should be done to involve the voting public in the political decision-making process, prompting policies around direct democracy.

Boiled down, direct democracy is putting more decisions to the people, typically through binding referenda.

There are varying iterations of this in use throughout the world and referenda can be held for big Government decisions or ideas the public come up with, if they are endorsed by a certain percentage of the populational, called citizens-initiated binding referenda.

New Zealand currently has provisions for citizens-initiated referenda. It also holds referendums on certain issues – think the $26 million flag decision or the referenda on euthanasia and cannabis at the 2020 election.

However, it’s making these referenda binding and using them more often which a number of smaller right-leaning parties, including Brian Tamaki’s Freedoms New Zealand party, Liz Gunn’s New Zealand Loyal party and Democracy NZ, and the more centrist TOP party, are calling for.

Tamaki says being more involved in the political decision-making process would allow people who were disengaged from politics to re-engage.

He says a model similar to the Swiss direct democracy would allow citizens to decide on moral issues and education reform, and that could be done using an app and RealMe, an identification verification platform.

In Switzerland many decisions are put to a referendum. Last year its citizens voted to ban human and animal experimentation and protect children from tobacco packaging advertising. And, among other things, they voted on an amendment to an act relating to stamp duty and the amount of money given to media agencies.

Tamaki, whose party is polling around 1%, says if he is elected to parliament, in the first 100 days he will push for a bill that would allow citizens to vote online on certain issues and establish binding referenda.

It’s a move Democracy NZ party leader Matt King has also committed to.

The system currently in place is governed by the Citizens Initiated Referenda Act 1993.

A citizen-initiated referendum starts with a petitioner submitting a request to the Clerk of the House of Representatives. Then a process to decide the final wording of the petition follows.

After that, the petition organiser has to collect signatures from at least 10% of registered voters in 12 months.

Data released by elections.nz at the end of August shows there are 3,452,641 registered voters, meaning 345,264 would need to sign the petition before it is put to the public.

By comparison, the 10% threshold is high. In Switzerland, any 100,000 eligible voters from the country of 8 million people can make a proposal to revise the federal constitution and then the proposed change is put to a vote.

As for federal laws, if 50,000 citizens demand a referendum on a new or revised federal law, the introduction of the law has to pass a referendum.

These figures are more in line with what budding politician Chris Newman is calling for.

Newman started a Facebook group called Direct Democracy New Zealand and is standing as a candidate for Liz Gunn’s party, New Zealand Loyal, in Auckland’s Upper Harbour electorate. He wants a system that allows citizens to recall politicians through a referendum if 100,000 people sign a petition.

If this is achieved, a referendum on whether the MP should stand down or not would be put to the people.

Newman says direct democracy has been looked at before and an 1891 report by the Constitutional Reform Committee almost brought the Swiss model to New Zealand.

The report, signed by the chairman of the committee Eugene O’Conor, advocated correcting New Zealand’s “party government” by importing some elements of the Swiss Federation Constitution. Newman is a fan.

There are also online groups calling for a “complete referendum system”. Telegram group Direct Democracy in NZ, which is separate from Newman’s group, says within its proposed system people could “request a referendum on anything that you can justify and that others can support you in and where youve [sic] clearly thought it through”.

“You can vote on referendums, you can see the result of referendums. You can proxy your vote out if you dont [sic] have the bandwidth to go through everything.

“Referendums can be on local and national issues,” the post by Direct Democracy in NZ says.

Victoria University researcher Max Rashbrooke says direct democracy has a strong appeal to fringe parties because they distrust politicians and do not believe their decisions accurately reflect society as a whole.

“Direct democracy, as I think of it, refers to things like referendums. So you have a system like the Swiss one where a lot of decisions are made by referendums, big political decisions get put out to referendum and the public, and then the results of the referendum are binding on the government.

“That’s a model that’s popular among some people who don’t like representative democracy. It’s Brexit, right? It’s taking back control, so that appeals to a number of fringe parties that don’t have much trust in politicians.”

Rashbrooke says having more referenda is participatory but not necessarily deliberative, in that people aren’t necessarily making informed decisions.

“People are participating directly in decision-making, but it’s not what political scientists would call deliberative in the sense that there’s no evidence that people have deliberated, that [they have] engaged in careful thought and high-quality public discussion before they vote,” he says.

The Opportunities Party (TOP) leader Raf Manji says there are ways to overcome this but agrees for direct democracy to be effective people have to be making educated decisions.

He is critical of the way the cannabis referendum was run at the last election, when voters were asked to pass their view on legalising euthanasia and cannabis, which were a yes and no respectively.

He says the cannabis referendum was quite clunky and old-school – “a really bad piece of political engagement”.

“There wasn’t a lot of information provided, the questions were not phrased in an accessible way.

“If you had taken a citizens’ assembly approach like they did in Ireland, that probably would have passed easily,” Manji says of the ‘no’ vote on cannabis.

Manji has studied how Ireland and France used citizens’ assemblies to discuss moral and environmental issues and argues this is a great way for people to have deliberate conversations before the decision-making process takes place.

In Ireland, a citizens’ assembly of 99 randomly chosen members provided recommendations to the government that led to a public referendum on the abortion law.

As well as the in-person assemblies, Manji is also keen to explore “what technology is going to bring as a way of participating in an online and digital environment”.

He says better citizen engagement will lead to better political outcomes.

“If you actually have a secure engagement platform with the government, like you do with your bank, then we should be able to enable online voting not just for elections but through either direct democracy, like referenda, or just ways of participating in conversations.”

He says there is already software out there being used by countries to engage citizens, like Taiwan’s vTaiwan, which allows the public to vote on questions and influence what questions are asked in the first place via consensus items – statements people from all walks of life agree on.

But there are doubts about whether increasing direct democracy techniques actually engages more people and is any better than the current system.

At the last general election, about 81% of the enrolled voters ticked the boxes, a turnout far better than the 66% in the 2020 USA presidential election or the 67% in the 2019 UK election.

New Zealand is also already regarded as being one of the most democratic countries in the world. Statista, a website collecting data from different sources around the world, ranks New Zealand as the second most democratic country thanks to its electoral process and pluralism, political participation and civil liberties.

Meanwhile, Our World in Data ranks New Zealand eighth, behind the Scandinavian countries, Switzerland and Belgium, but ahead of France and the United Kingdom.

University of Otago professor of law Andrew Geddis says New Zealand’s current system is a parliamentary democracy, where members of the parliament are elected to choose the laws on behalf of citizens.

These politicians are paid to take the time and effort to understand legislative proposals, the complexities and potential effects, he says.

“We don’t have time to do that. The reality is most of us have got busy lives with lots and lots of things we’ve got to do. We just don’t have the time or the energy to spend working out what is the best law for the country.

“So, we delegate, we give over to the MPs the right to make the laws and then every three years we judge whether they have done a good job or not.”