There are many attractive things about strong government, not least the terminology used to describe it: muscular, decisive, bold, firm, focused, powerful, vital, resolute, unyielding and leadership-driven.
It's punchy, dynamic, upbeat.
Weak government, on the other hand is effete, ineffective, ineffectual, confused, tired, emotional, namby-pamby, flaky, dissolute, directionless and... self-indulgent. Who'd be doing with that?
After all, haven't we all, in our own small ways, come across localised versions of the two: at the bowls club, in the social committee, the parent-teachers' association, the book group.
Interminable meetings which, whether out of politeness, reticence or a genuine lack of any idea as to the business at hand, ramble up hill, down dale and across time as if there were no tomorrow and nobody had a home to go to.
What's required is the strong chair, an alpha personality with the drive to gets things done.
Thank God for someone who knows what they want... and if it's not quite what the rest of us were thinking, now you mention it, not at all what the rest of us had in mind, well, tough.
It's just how the cookie crumbles.
It's human nature, isn't it?It's a complaint and a comparison you often hear about higher forms of government.
First Past the Post: you know where you are with that, no mucking around. As for Mixed Member Proportional Representation - even the name is dodgy: sounds like a cross-gender show-and-tell party.
So no prizes for guessing which, at least according to the popular imagination, is likely to deliver strong government and which weak.
And we New Zealanders like strong government, don't we? We like being told what to do. Or so the story goes.
Anyway, you can see how this one could pan out.
It's not too much of a leap of rhetoric to begin planting the seed of consequences: perhaps if we'd had a more muscular, more decisive government we wouldn't be in the economic quicksand.
If we were to change horses, back to FPP, we might be a hell of a lot better off.
We'd get things done. You wouldn't have to consult with every Tom, Dierdre and Harriet.
Life would be a simpler; a lot more efficient.
So although John Key articulated his and National's plans at the weekend for a new referendum on the fate of MMP in the most benign terms, almost as if it were an afterthought - "Oh, and by the way, we thought we might have a little vote on the small matter of how our democracy works; no big deal, just a little tick on a little piece of paper" - that's not quite how some are interpreting the semaphore.
Mr Key is signalling his party's acquiescence to the possibility of going back to the good old days of robust, no-nonsense FPP government.
In so doing, he will earn the undying support - and quite probably the donations - of that group of influential citizens to whom the arrival of MMP was at best an affront and at worst a dilution of power and privilege.
To be sure, MMP has its drawbacks and its frustrations: the perception of undue power lying in the hands of fickle self-interested minorities; the constant horse-trading and compromising to shape and shift legislation; the additional fiscal impost of an enlarged Parliament; the at times unwieldy and unpredictable nature of the beast.
But lest it be forgotten, democracy in most comparable western countries is delivered through a two-chamber system.
New Zealand is, if not unique, then unusual, in having only the single chamber. There is no House of Lords or Senate or Upper House.
Great power is concentrated in a legislatively promiscuous executive.
It was the abuse of this power - particularly evident under Sir Robert Muldoon in the late '70s and early '80s - that led to reform.
Sir Robert's FPP government was indeed robust and muscular and unyielding and decisive and, well - by the standards we have come to expect of government today - undemocratic.
And whatever you think of Pita Sharples, or Janette Fitzsimons, or Peter Dunne or Winston Peters, they all have their constituencies.
Their inclusion in Parliament has helped to create a more representative form of democracy for an evolving society.
But critically, in the absence of that second chamber, MMP also acts as a powerful brake on the sort of "strong" runaway government that FPP can produce.
We would revert at our peril.
- Simon Cunliffe is assistant editor at the Otago Daily Times.
