What the world can learn from Aotearoa New Zealand

What are those Kiwis on? Even as they endure the world’s strictest lockdown to combat an outbreak of Covid-19 delta, New Zealanders’ rating of the government’s responses to the pandemic remains very high (approaching 80% approval according to a survey published in The Spinoff, 23 Aug 2021) and the majority continue to express overall trust in government.

This is bucking a world trend of declining trust, polarization and government ineptitude. Indeed, cynicism has reached such depths that commentators outside of New Zealand hope that the country fails in its fight to eliminate the deadly virus and they profess to pity Kiwis for complying with effective public-health measures. But perhaps they should listen and learn from New Zealand instead.

There was a time in history when the small nations, especially the younger ones, looked up to their older more established allies for the example of how to govern. But the roles are now reversed. The erstwhile ‘leaders of the free world’ and ‘mothers of parliaments’ and the like now should be looking to small countries such as New Zealand for lessons.

Not only are wellbeing and trust indicators higher in smaller democracies, but public dissatisfaction with democracy is low and declining in those countries as well, according to the 2020 Global Satisfaction with Democracy Report. The Scandinavian countries, as always, perform well on such league tables, and these countries use various forms of proportional representation for elections.

New Zealand departed from the Westminster model of single-member electorates (won on a simple plurality) in 1996 and adopted a mixed-member proportional representation system. Unlike Britain, Australia, Canada and the United States, dissatisfaction with democracy didn’t grow in New Zealand since the mid-1990s.

But, in some important respects, New Zealand differs also from the Scandinavians: it hasn’t experienced the party fragmentation and the rise of far-right ‘pariah’ parties (with whom no one wants to form governments) that we’ve seen in Sweden and Denmark, as well as in the Netherlands and Germany.

In general, New Zealand is a political outlier, but it sets an example from which the world can learn.