New Zealand Politics

Jess, thanks for the reminder :)

New Zealand has a Prime Minister and a Parliament, both of which are elected. The two main parties are Labour and National, both of which are pretty moderate as far as I can tell (it's not quite the left-wing/right-wing differences that Republicans and Democrats have in the US). There are also several smaller parties: the only ones I can think of off the top of my head are the Green Party and the Maori Party, both of which are pretty self-explanatory. I think the smaller parties actually do have some power in NZ, as opposed to the US where they rarely get elected for anything. When I arrived in New Zealand, the Prime Minister was Helen Clark (Labour). I think she will be leaving office at some point in the next week or two because in the elections on November 8th, John Key (National) was elected as the new Prime Minister of New Zealand.

A few of the issues in the elections that I heard people talking about were the possibility of a universal student allowance and some sort of plan to financially help people who lose their jobs due to the current economic crunch. For the student allowance, some students are currently receiving money from the government to help pay for university but it depends on age and parent income, so it's not a system that is helpful to everyone. I'm pretty sure that one proposition was just to give a student allowance to everyone- you can guess that was a pretty popular idea with many of my friends who studying!!! As for the plan to help people between jobs, I think both Labour and National had proposed plans. The choice wasn't so much if it was a good idea so much as which was the better idea. I'm not sure what the other issues in this election were.

The voting system in New Zealand is quite different from the US- there is nothing like the Electoral College here. Instead, each person gets two separate votes on their ballot. I think this is how it goes: one vote is for the party they would like to see in power and the other is for the local representative (who can but doesn't have to be the same party as the first vote). Parties that win more than 5% of the total New Zealand vote and parties that win one or more local elections are entitled to seats in Parliament. There are also a certain number of seats reserved for Maori, who can choose to vote either in the general election or to enroll on a separate electoral roll and vote for the specifically Maori seats. None of that is a very good explanation, sorry. There are some good articles in Wikipedia if you're interested. Try:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_system_of_New_Zealand
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_zealand_elections
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_Politics

That's actually a lot more reading than I intended, it's like a "New Zealand Politics 101 Course Reading List," sorry! And Jess, feel free to add anything relevant in the comments, you understand all this way better than I do!!!