Today's soapbox topic: First Past the Post elections. No doubt you've all at least looked at your electoral papers by now and for those of you in Auckland you'll know that the Mayoral election is FPP. There are only three, maybe four serious contenders for the job - almost certainly one of Phil Goff, Vic Crone or John Palino will be our next mayor.

Everybody acknowledges we have a housing crisis in Auckland. One which is beginning to spill over into the rest of the country, I might add. This crisis is OK for me. It's OK for my friends. We had the business foresight to be born in 1975 instead of 1995. We bought our properties at more-or-less reasonable prices with sustainable mortgages. Even those who nominally paid $1M for their current property are OK because they flipped from one house to another so their mortgages stayed roughly the same.

But it is the young people are being shafted. I look at my own kids and I don't see them ever being able to find a place of their own. Unless something changes in a big way, they're going to spend a great part of their adult lives living in my house, or in the house of their partner's parents, probably raising their own kids there, because they just won't be able to afford not to.

It is the political old guard who are responsible for facilitating this mess. Yes, investors are partially responsible too, but they are reacting to the political and legal environment which makes property speculation the apparently most rational way to invest. Limited new land for development, density restrictions, approving terrible Soviet-prison-inspired concrete boxes when they are allowed to instensify, red tape, practically no tax on investment earnings. You can't really blame people for acting rationally and snapping up whatever investment houses they can get their hands on.

And here is why I think the FPP system should be scrapped in favour of a preferential electoral system. I would have voted for Chloe Swarbrick. Her generation are the ones that are hit by the issue; they should have a chance to do something about it. Sure, I doubt she has all the answers, or even any of the answers - but do any of the others? Even if they do, they're certainly not actually doing anything about it.

But she isn't going to win. If you vote for her, your vote achieves nothing. So instead, you hold your nose and choose whether you want to vote for a) career politician, b) ex-CEO rich white lady or c) ex-CEO rich white man with lingering stench of fomented political scandal. I don't really want to get into a discussion of which of the three is the least worst so I won't say which one I chose.

All I want to point out is that the other candidates are going to get fewer - possibly far fewer - votes than they should have, because FPP discourages voting for anyone who isn't clearly already a high chance of winning. That means we not only miss the opportunity to get someone new (and who, let's face it, can't be worse than what we've got) but even the opportunity to simply show our displeasure with the old guard by putting them down as no. 2.

FPP: has to go!