MW: Hi everybody and welcome back to another show, the Free Speech Space with MJ. And today we are chatting with the Democratic Alliance Party talking about how we push past the MMP 5% threshold get our minor parties across the line, a little bit about MMP, what it does and whether MMP is actually passed its use by date.
MW: I’ve got to say to you, I’ve got to share my disappointment with you on this, on the independent vote, the minor party vote. But we still seem to have racked up that elusive challenge, you know, of getting one minor party across that 5% threshold. It still hasn’t happened in the history of MMP since it started. And it seems to be ironic, really. MMP was set up so that we’d get more minor voices in Parliament.
JK: Yeah, not a new minor party. I know that of course, Jim Anderton with the Alliance Party had achieved that, the formation of three or four other parties collectively together, but he was ex-Labour and we have had no new contenders come in that have set up their own parties. So, Like you, I was really hopeful that if we were going to get a new minor party across the board, this election was the one to actually work collectively together. There was enough of a a group of supporters and voters that were vocal enough that all wanted to see the minor parties unite. At the end of the day, unfortunately, yeah, each of the minor parties, apart from Freedom NZ, but the others decided to go it alone. And the result is astounding. And they even performed worse than I thought that they would.
And I think that’s as a result of many voters that just decided not to end up voting for any of them because they wouldn’t actually listen to the people. And that’s the sad outcome I think. Collectively the freedom minor parties are sitting at a 2.54% which is way lower than what I’ve seen.
That’s currently without actually having counted the additional special votes on election night and that’s the Freedom Minor Party, so I’m not counting top in that and I’m not counting the Animal Rights Party in that or the Marijuana Party, but just the Freedom Minor Parties are sitting at 2.54%.
I guess the parties and their party boards, their leaders and their party boards should really reflect on this and really continue listening to that echo and the resounding cries of the people around Unite, Unite. And because they didn’t do that, what will they do between now and 2026?
It is that getting past their differences, getting past the fact that when you’re in election mode, you’re after the votes and you’re going to say things against your opponents, but they need to actually get beyond that and form relationships and form alliances to be able to actually get over that 5% threshold. And even if they think, because we know that the Electoral Commission after the review was talking about reducing or dropping the actual rate down to, threshold down to 3.5% most likely for the 2026 election as well as the voter age down to 16. If those things come into play, that doesn’t mean to say that they’re more likely to get in because if you look at the result, as I just mentioned, even if they formed a collective together, they are still going to be having to put the hard effort in because at this stage, they were still only sitting at 2.54%, so which is still not above the 3.5%.
MW: Probably one of the most significant aspects of your campaign and the most significant aspects to move forward to try and get those minor parties talking and trusting each other and moving within that eight point constitution, which incidentally, as I remember you saying, that it was a unified eight point constitution.
JK: Yeah, the guiding principles, those eight guiding principles that we have embedded within the party constitution are basically the same right across those minor parties. So in that sense, it’s not only a no-brainer that they work collectively together. And if they were to understand that collectively, although they’re all slightly different, the actual eight guiding principles across their parties are the same. And coming together collectively, they actually represent a wider voter base because there is a wider number of voters can actually relate to them because they are made up of so many different parts. And in that sense, they would build momentum. And once they would form a united front, the voters would get in behind them and they would get rewarded richly for having come together and all sing from the same song sheet.
Watch the Video for the Full Interview Content…
And I think that’s as a result of many voters that just decided not to end up voting for any of them because they wouldn’t actually listen to the people. And that’s the sad outcome I think. Collectively the freedom minor parties are sitting at a 2.54% which is way lower than what I’ve seen.