Cross-Party Dialogue Norms

Yeah, well, grand coalitions aren't unusual. In the sense Germany's operated much of the last 20 years with a grand coalition between the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats. Finland often has a grand coalition, has one now. Ireland has a grand coalition. New Zealand, during the First World War, there was a coalition between the Liberals and Reform. In the Second World War, it was done differently. You hit a war cabinet for a while, not many New Zealanders know about this, 1941 to 45, I think, where they had a cabinet of five, three from Labour, two from National, that dealt only with war-related issues, and the rest of the cabinet continued to run the country as a Labour government. And then you had a grand coalition again, or before that, I should say, in 31 to 35, between United and Reform. faced with the challenges of the depression. I don't think it would work particularly well in New Zealand. I think you need to have a strong opposition. There's an old saying, a man who marries his mistress creates a vacancy and an opposition that goes into government with the governing party also creates a vacancy. And that vacancy is for an extreme party to then be seen as the key opposition and to enhance its voting support while the votes will drain away from the two parties that are in the Grand Coalition. So I don't think it would make sense for a major party. to go into a grand coalition other than in the circumstances of an emergency such as a war or some other catastrophic event. I think the other difficulty is that you take away from the electorate the choice of being able to have... an alternative party of government that's mainstream, because the two mainstream parties are already in government. And you also take away the ability of the electorate to award credit for what is done well and demerit points for what is done badly, because both of the major parties are already in government. So look, in a very serious emergency, the stability would be a good thing to have a coalition of that nature. Sure. I mean, another factor would be you could have a government of all the talents. You could take the most talented people, presuming that the most talented people are the ones that are actually elected to cabinet posts and put them in the one government. But really, I don't think it's going to happen in New Zealand and nor do I think it'd be a good thing for it to happen in New Zealand for the reasons that I've spelt out.