800 year old anachronism

This was published by the Bay of Plenty Times on Thursday, 22 February 2007:

If Maori electorates are “a paternalistic relic of the 19th century”, as your editorial of 3 February states, then the general electorates are a feudal relic of the 13th century. From that period Westminster-style democracies have based their redistribution of electorates on an undefined “community of interest” that usually amounts to a quaint notion that my interests are the same as the person next door. What may have been true for people eight hundred years ago is surely the real anachronism in today’s global village.

Maori people have some choice about their community of interest and many have decided that their ethnicity is more important than their street address. This option should be extended not only to Pacific Islanders, as Tariana Turia proposes, but to any group who feel they can identify their real community of interest better than half a dozen bureaucrats.

Students of electoral systems believe the rest of the world can learn from this unique New Zealand example of proportional representation. Maori achieved universal suffrage 12 years before European men and one day they will be able to boast that they were the first to break away from electorates based purely on geography.