Halting New Zealand's "dangerous" disengagement from politics

New Zealand's future could lie in the hands of about a million people -- but they don't seem to care.

That's the estimated number of eligible voters who failed to cast a ballot in Saturday's general election -- enough people to have reversed the center-right National Party's landslide re- election, or perhaps to have reinforced it.

Turnout of about 77.04 percent of 3.07 million registered voters was higher than the 74.2 percent who cast their ballot in the 2011 election, but the trend shows a steady decline since peaking at 93.7 percent in the 1984 election.

Another 10 percent of eligible voters failed to even register and if the trend continues, it could pose a serious threat to New Zealand's social and economic stability, say experts, who are stumped at how to encourage the "missing million" back to the polling booths in 2017.

"It doesn't take a hell of a lot of imagination to envisage a time when, because those people play no role in decisions about Parliaments and government formation, the politicians sort of forget about them and don't attend to them," Massey University head of politics Associate Professor Richard Shaw told Xinhua.

"Then you wind up with quite a dangerous state of affairs where governments make policies in reaction to or in response to the needs of those people who do vote," Shaw said in a phone interview.

"There are all sorts of unpleasant things that will stem in the long haul if the trend is not addressed and turned around."

An Electoral Commission survey of non-voters after the 2011 election found 33 percent agreed that "I don't trust politicians" was an important factor in not voting, followed by "It was obvious who would win so why bother" (31 percent) and "I'm just not interested in politics" (29 percent).

The results suggested that measures such as on-line voting or civics and citizenship lessons at school, while welcome, were unlikely to get non-voters back to the polling stations, said Shaw.

"My sense is that people who don't vote are people who are disengaged, are marginalized, who for one reason or several don't feel any stake in the national community so they don't see any particular point in voting. It's not just apathy," he said.

"I think there is something to do with levels of socio-economic inequality, which manifest themselves in decisions people make not to vote."

New Zealand's radical free market reforms in the 1980s and 1990s seemed to have shifted the theoretical center of politics to the right.

Policies of the defeated center-left Labor Party, which had been described as "far left" such as a capital gains tax on property would be considered "utterly mainstream" in many other OECD (Organization for Economic Development and Co-operation) countries.

"We consider things normal that might not be considered so normal in other parts of the world," said Shaw.

"There is something that is not working in our political institutions," he said.

"There seems to be something that is out of synch and some of it has to do with political parties, the way they function, the way that they don't -- in quite the same way as might have been the case 40 years ago -- seem to connect people who are governed to the government."

"I would imagine that has something to do with the professionalization of political parties and narrowing of their membership base and increasing attention being paid to focus group- driven policy-making, emphasis on party leaders, the personalization of politics. A lot of people don't identify with their parties as they might once have."

Research showed that young people -- thought to be the bulk of non-voters -- who failed to vote the first time they were eligible from age 18 could become "serial non-voters."

"It's even more of a concern if we see the non-voting behavior flowing through to the next generation, the next age cohort of 25 to 29-year-olds, then what you're looking at is a sort of a train wreck -- in three elections' time, you could have almost nobody under the age of 35 or 40 voting," said Shaw.

Neighboring Australia's compulsory voting laws guaranteed high turnouts, but in New Zealand some people had "quite compelling or at least principled reasons for not voting, so making it a requirement to vote could be seen to be at odds with some of the fundamental liberties and freedoms that we guarantee people."