There's an interesting article on The Spinoff, worried that with so many parties ruling out working with each other, MMP is collapsing back into left-right, "winner take all" politics. It points to a shift back to the pre-MMP elected dictatorship model of government by decree, "outsized" influence of small parties, and stronger political alignments between parties as problematic. I'm not so sure.
The first is definitely a problem. But its a problem specifically of this regime, and to a large extent it seems to be a self-correcting one, in that the public has shown little appetite for this government's preferred model of retrospective laws rammed through under urgency without consultation, and seems likely to punish them for it. As for the future, this sort of contempt for democracy seems to be a right-wing problem: in the past, National has always had a greater appetite for abuse than Labour, and the latter has been specifically constrained by coalition partners who denied the use of urgency outside of accepted norms (the budget, end of year wash-up, and the rare cases when things are actually urgent). National has usually not faced such constraints, and this term has had coalition partners who are explicitly anti-democratic and anti-constitutional. The lesson for voters is not to let that happen again, and to punish those parties until they credibly commit to respecting a democratic, consultative style of government.
On the second point, the article notes that
It is neither possible nor desirable to quantify the degree of sway a smaller partner in a coalition should have. That is a political question, not a technical one.Ultimately, it is we voters who are going to decide how much of this we are going to accept - and what we do about it. And on that, I'd note that no parliament can bind its successor, and so what is done can simply be undone. If we don't like radical fringe parties using coalition bargaining and big-party weakness to impose unpopular, radical policies by undemocratic means, we can simply repeal them. And if we are successful in making this a one-term regime (or better yet, a half-term one), then that is exactly what we should do, with an Omnibus Repeal Bill to restore the status quo ante and make it as if this regime never happened.
(And to those crying foul over the threat of such policy ping-pong, I'd point out that its pretty much what the current regime has done; they just took a year and multiple bills to dismantle everything, rather than having the honesty to do it in one go.)
On the third point, there's the usual lament about the lack of a "center" party to change sides every election and moderate the demands of the wing parties. The traditional answer to this is to point to the long list of such failed projects in the past, and argue that people don't vote for that (or at least, not enough people; the unfair and undemocratic 5% threshold almost certainly has prevented such a party from gaining a foothold and then demonstrating credibility to potential voters). But I think we've also really already got two such parties, in National and Labour, who are naturally chasing the center voter in competition with each other. Normally this gives them an incentive to push back against demands from their respective wing-parties in coalition, and creates a dynamic where those wanting real change vote for the wings rather than the center. Where there are multiple coalition partners there are also usually competing demands, which means that everyone constrains everyone else. And again, what's unusual about the present regime is that this isn't happening: NZFirst and ACT are largely in policy agreement about racism and environmental destruction, while National, bereft of an agenda of its own, simply accepts the one handed to it by its "partners". So again, the problem is that this is not a normal regime, but that doesn't seem like it'll necessarily be a problem in future (especially if voters kick National out of power at the first opportunity as punishment for their abnormality).
And all of that said: none of this means I disagree with the final conclusion of the article: that our lack of constitutional safeguards means we need to "look beyond MMP for other ways to limit the power of its governments." Because that is one thing that this debacle of a government has made crystal clear. We need to shift power away from the over-mighty parliament (and the over-mighty executive which pulls its strings and uses it as a rubber-stamp), and move it back to voters, to local government, to the Waitangi Tribunal, and to the courts. As for those demanding we surrender even more power to this abusive institution via a longer parliamentary term, they can get fucked.
