THE PRESS MONDAY, JANUARY 12, 1987. Hijacking an election

Press, 12 January 1987, Page 16

THE PRESS MONDAY, JANUARY 12, 1987. Hijacking an election

The Coalition of Concerned Citizens has announced its intention to try to hijack this year’s General Election. The group believes it can encourage voters to cast their votes in line with the coalition’s strategies — first to "punish” sitting members of Parliament who voted in support of homosexual law reform; second to oust other M.P.S who show signs of social liberality; and third, as a corollary, to try to fill a majority of Parliamentary seats with politicians who would support the group’s own brand of conservative morality to the point of imposing it on others. Political activity by any group is not to be discouraged in a democracy, of course, provided that affairs are conducted within the law. It may even be argued that New Zealand voters need prodding out of their lethargy — or apathy — from time to time. Campaigns by pressure groups help to focus political attention on particular issues, and to alert voters to questions and possible answers of which they might otherwise be unaware. Such activity, however, is far removed from the avowed Intention of the coalition to polarise votes in the General Election around the already settled issue of homosexual law reform.

The danger of single-issue politics is that it results in tunnel vision, both on the part of the voters and of the resulting Governments. A voting public blinkered to the point of voting exclusively in terms of a narrow evangelical ethos is likely to get a Government that responds to little else. Single-issue lobbies attain an electoral importance beyond their numbers simply because they are single-minded, and

therefore not swayed by any of the host of other considerations that voters should balance up before making a choice. This has the effect of making the single issue correspondingly more important.— in shortterm electoral advantage — than other economic, social, and political questions.

The greatest harm in this sort of campaign, however, is not just the attempt to distort an election, or the blinding of voters to equally important or more important issues, but the residue of instability it bequeaths to the whole political scene. By its own accounting, the coalition’s first victim will be the Labour Government, for it is in the Labour caucus that the coalition has targeted most of the unacceptably liberal M.P.S it hopes to banish to the political wilderness. The more seriously afflicted party, however, could be the National Party which, a coalition spokesman claims, has been “penetrated significantly” by coalition supporters. This claim may well be mainly boast; but the infiltration of one of New Zealand’s two main political parties,, to the extent that its Centre-Right politics could be restricted to a narrower, more reactionary manifesto, could well be the death-knell for the party, as well as creating a period of prolonged instability while voters and the parties sort themselves out. The National Party has withstood attempts to drag it to the Right before; in normal circumstances it might be expected to do so again. The times for the party are not normal, however, and in its present traumas it could fall prey to a take-over bid.