Political Comment | Canterbury News | Local News in Canterbury

By Rod Donald, Green Party co-leader

I hope readers will forgive me for feeling a little defensive about STV after the vote processing botch ups at the local body elections.

After all, I campaigned for STV well before I entered Parliament and was successful in getting it incorporated in the Local Electoral Act in 2001. However I reject David Carter's extraordinary claims that I was the architect of the recent shambles. Unfortunately the Government never allowed me to do what good architects do, which is to supervise the construction of the building they designed.

I believe a lot of the problems that occurred could have been avoided and others were specific to one of the three contractors licensed to process the votes.

Christchurch-based Electionz.com and NZ Post subsidiary Data Mail are clearly at fault for the delays with many results. Equally clearly, the Taranaki Councils and Independent Election Services were very efficient and reported their results within 24 hours of the polls closing. In other words, the delays were the fault of the operator, not the system itself. If David Carter took the time to analyse the final results he would quickly see that the drop in turnout in some places, such as Christchurch, and the increase in other places, such as Auckland, had more to do with whether there was a serious mayoral contest than which voting system was used.

But STV did make a real difference to the Canterbury Health Board result. While six of the candidates would have been elected by either FPP or STV, Heather Carter from 'Health Cuts Hurt' won the seventh seat under STV, even though she ranked tenth on first preferences.

The fact she was elected points to one of the main benefits of STV, which is that you can vote positively for all the candidates you really want and know that you vote won't be wasted if your first choice doesn't get in.

I am also pleased to see that STV has delivered excellent geographic representation.

Opponents of the change claimed that the abolition of wards would leave rural communities unrepresented. However not only did Canterbury voters elect Jo Kane from Waikuku and Olive Webb from Hororata but Lawrence Malcolm from Governors Bay was also successful. That means the Banks Peninsula district as well as both the old North and Mid-Canterbury wards have locals on the health board, proving that non-city voters will still be represented by local people if they give them their first preferences. Another obvious benefit of STV is that 89% of those who voted cast at least one of their preferences for a successful candidate. This contrasts with the 2001 FPP result where 71.8% of the votes were wasted on losing candidates.

I look forward to the parliamentary inquiry thoroughly examining all of the problems that occurred at the local elections as well as the relative merits of STV and FPP and I hope those of you with suggestions on how we can improve our local democracy will make a submission. In the meantime you can contact me at my Christchurch office ph 365-5693 or email me through our website www.greens.org.nz with your thoughts.