Danyl McLauchlan: Our politicians agree a four-year term is better so why don’t voters?

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Rare consensus: Act and NZ First negotiated agreements with National to progress a bill legislating for a third referendum which – if voters agreed – would extend the term of government to four years. Photo / Getty Images
What if they just need more time? Politicians have grumbled for years about the brevity of New Zealand’s three-year parliamentary term. They’ve tried to extend it twice: referendums were held in 1967 and 1990, and both times the electorate firmly rejected the idea.

Now, Parliament is at it again: Act
and New Zealand First negotiated agreements with National to progress a bill legislating for another referendum which – if voters agreed – would extend the term of government to four years. Christopher Luxon has announced that he expects to “take it to the New Zealand people at the next election”.

There’s rare parliamentary consensus over this. Everyone agrees a four-year term would be better. The stated reason for the extension is that our politicians need more time to grapple with the huge issues facing the nation. The economy, climate, crime – they just want to better serve us.
Their primary motivation is that fighting election campaigns is exhausting, stressful, time-consuming and expensive, so they’d rather not do it so often. But there’s also persuasive evidence in the political science literature that longer terms encourage better law-making.
There are approximately 190 parliaments around the world; only nine of them have three-year terms. Most go for four or five years, and five feels a little too generous – why shouldn’t we have four?
The answer – as nearly every constitutional lawyer and political scientist in the nation will tell you – is that other democracies also have checks and balances that limit the power of their parliaments, while New Zealand has nothing.
Some nations have an upper house – Australia and the US have their senates, the UK the House of Lords – that can delay, review, revise and sometimes reject legislation. Some have a written constitution and courts that can strike down laws they deem in breach of its provisions.
Some have robust state or local governments. Most OECD nations employ a combination of these to limit the dread power of the state.
New Zealand doesn’t have any of these measures. If the coalition government decides to imprison all Listener readers indefinitely without trial it can place itself under urgency and pass that legislation overnight. The Attorney-General would dutifully advise that the law was inconsistent with the Bill of Rights, but such findings are often largely meaningless.
Parliament is sovereign and nothing constrains it – except the brevity of the parliamentary term.
MMP has attenuated some of the excesses of our over-centralisation of power. There hasn’t been a Robert Muldoon or Roger Douglas since the transition to a proportional parliament. We voted in a majority government in 2020 in response to Jacinda Ardern’s extraordinary leadership during the pandemic and we’re not likely to repeat that.
MPs insist that the select committee process – in which bills are scrutinised and responded to by experts, interested parties and the general public, and ministers are grilled by opposition MPs – delivers all the accountability and oversight you need.
And sometimes it does, but governments routinely override the select committee process at their whim. National’s Gangs Legislation Amendment Bill was recently amended after select committee, with significant new powers granted to the police.
If ministers can breach the sanctity of the committee process, it’s hard to see why the public should take it seriously.
The bill to establish the referendum on the four-year term will be sponsored by Act leader David Seymour, who also initiated the euthanasia referendum and is still plugging away at his doomed treaty principles referendum. He has correctly identified that this is an effective way to promote himself and his party between general elections, albeit at vast expense to the taxpayer.
Seymour proposes that to compensate for the extended term, Parliament modifies the operation of select committees so they’re dominated by opposition MPs rather than the government of the day. This might be a worthy idea – although it might just prompt governments to pass more laws under urgency or amend them post-committee, like the gang law.
It’s certainly not a real limitation on parliamentary power. Whenever there’s a problem in our politics – donations, lobbying, bullying – our politicians prefer to create the illusion of change while keeping everything the same.
It’s hard to imagine the public warming to this proposal. Trust in politicians has been declining steadily for years and political parties are some of the least-trusted institutions in the country.
The nation does not feel well governed, so making the government itself less accountable feels like another step in the wrong direction.
And yet, at least Seymour understands that the problems in our politics are systemic: that we won’t solve them by voting in different governments that tinker with the public service and fiddle with the tax system.
His referendum and his new (lavishly funded) Ministry for Regulation are attempts to change how the country is run rather than merely switching out the names of the people who run it, and he seems to be the only politician thinking about these issues.
But the real solutions lie in constraining politicians like Seymour, rather than empowering them. That’s what successful liberal democracies do: written constitutions, bicameral parliaments, stronger local government.
New Zealand used to have an upper house: the legislative council. It was broken by the rise of the modern parties, National and Labour, and finally abolished in 1951 by the first National government.
The chamber where they sat on the second floor of Parliament is occasionally used for functions and ceremonial occasions. Most of the time, it’s an empty space where an important element of our democracy could have been.
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