www.oocities.org/ubinz/press/1999B23HeraldRudmanDefection.html

Just as the whiff of change starts wafting through the land, Prime Minister-in-waiting Helen Clark goes and spoils the mood. Not for her a post election Prague spring. Instead, she plans to summon MPs together to debate a law forcing them to agree to commit political hara-kiri if they ever desert their party.

Given the popular dislike of politicians, Ms Clark's anti party-hopping legislation will do her no harm at the ballot box on Saturday, especially when she dresses it up in the academic argument that it must be done to protect the party proportions decided on by voters at the general election.

However, its main effect will be to tighten party control over individual MPs, adding a powerful new tool to the disciplinary arsenal of the party leaders.

Keith Holyoake would have loved it. He was the Prime Minister who had all incoming ministers sign an undated letter of resignation before they headed off to Government House to be sworn in. His message was clear: I'm the boss; toe my line or I'll fill in the missing date and you're out.

To be sure, 13 MPs, nearly 11 per cent of the Parliament, indulged in a bit of party-hopping over the past three years. But did the sky fall in? Well, in Winston Peters' world, the answer is yes. But otherwise our democracy seems to have survived unscarred. Which is more than can be said for the party-hoppers themselves.

The opinion polls suggest that most, if not all, of them will be disciplined for their fickleness this Saturday by the people who put them in Parliament to begin with. Tan Henare, Tuku Morgan, Alamein Kopu and all seem destined for the dole queue. The people put them in, now they're kicking them out. That's the way it should be in a democracy.

Agreed, MPs wear a party label and many now come via a party list. But they are still elected as thinking, sentient, individual human beings. They are not robots, programmed to obey at all times the leader and the party manifesto.

This has been an accepted principle of Westminster democracy since before Edmund Burke's famous enunciation of it in a speech to the voters of Bristol in 1774: "You choose a member, but when you have chosen him he is not the member of Bristol, he is a member of Parliament."

Admittedly, an electorate MP can always resign and stand again in the resultant by-election. This is what Jim Anderton did in 1989 when he left Labour - after being expelled from caucus - and was reincarnated as the leader of New Labour. But this not an avenue open to the new breed of list MPs.

If party-hopping really is an issue, the sensible course is to include it in the general review of MMP to take place before the 2002 election. However, I suspect it will die down as the new system beds in. Most of the recent cases are easy enough to explain.

In the months leading up to the first MMP election in 1996,13 MPs defected from their parties and scurried off looking to position themselves for the new game. Which was fair enough, given that some knew they would not get one of the reduced number of electorate seats.

Since that election, another 13 have defected. In the case of the Greens breaking away from the Alliance, that was an honourable and negotiated parting. As for the NZ First rabble, you could argue that they betrayed their electors long before their party-hopping began. That occurred after the 1996 election when they signed a coalition deal with National, reviving a Government they had sworn, throughout the election, they were out to defeat. Indeed, you could argue that the party-hopping by NZ First MPs was a desperate bid by those involved to hop back to the values they were elected to represent in the first place.

Which raises the question: if there is to be legislation aimed at keeping MPs honest, why not similar legislation forcing political parties to stick to their election promises? Imagine if that had been in force during the days of the Lange-Douglas excesses.

Yet, in effect, we already have such legislation. It's called the Electoral Act and it lets us all sit in judgement on politicians and parties every three years.