Checks and balances is crucial element political system in a state, it can prevent the government
holding too much powers and abuse of power,
ensuring the safety and rights of people at the same time. It can protect people's right
and safety from government's tyranny,
by restricting government's power under a fair conditions. This essay will
discuss what are the checks and balances by using separation of power,
MMP electoral systems, democratic participation and rule of law, what are the importance of their,
it will also analyze how well does these checks and balances works in a
democracy country New Zealand.
In order to prevent the government has too much power, the power of government is
divided into three branches, which are Legislature,
Executive and Judiciary. This makes the power of the branch of any one of them is
limited, to avoid power imbalance.
For example, the Legislature take charges of examine and supervise the
Executive while making the laws.
The role of Executive is to enforce and manage the law that made by Legislature.
The Judiciary duty is to maintain and ensure the law has been execute correctly.
The purpose of Separation of powers in modern times is to restrict the powers from government,
preventing abusing of power and state organ or personal dictatorship and tyranny,
in order to ensure national political stability.
People who has power are easy to abuse power, this has already been proved in many histories,
such as an autocratic tyrant rule in a feudal society.
Thus, whether for socialist or capitalist countries, separation of power is very important,
because restricting power is a essential need in a state
and the main purpose of doing this is to safeguard the rights of the people.
MMP is one of the two votes electoral system, it is a proportional
voting system that each voter has two votes, the first vote is for the political party
which largely decide the total number of seats each party
will gain in parliament, and the second vote is to select a MP to represent the local electorate.
The seats are allocate by which party has won
in electorate seats proportionally and the rest are count by MPs from its party list. In addition,
the party must obtain a more than 5% of the
proportion or win at least one electorate seat to gets a share of the seats in parliament.