Ani O'Brien: National's list and the quirks of MMP

National needs more votes, not a new electoral system

There are few surprises to be found in National’s list rankings for the election. Christopher Luxon is first, obviously. Then Nicola Willis, then Chris Bishop retains 3rd despite months of leadership gossip, and Simeon Brown and Erica Stanford round out the top 5. Paul Goldsmith follows at 6 and Gerry Brownlee has been hauled up from 14th at the last election to 9th. Nancy Lu is perhaps the most interesting promotion at 16th. And Melissa Lee, meanwhile, has fallen to 30th, which is a message to pack a lunch and start doorknocking.

National Party president Sylvia Wood called it an “energised team” combining experienced ministers with new candidates who have real world experience. Most of the immediate coverage concentrated on the usual list announcement questions. Who is up? Who is down? Who has been told that they now have an exciting opportunity to spend a great deal more time in their electorate?

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But this year, the most important National list is not the one National released. It is the one Curia pollster David Farrar produced after it.

Farrar took the published list and stripped out the candidates who can reasonably be expected to win safe National electorates. That leaves what he calls National’s “effective list”. The problem is that on current polling there may be no list seats for these people to fill. National could quite plausibly end up with no list MPs.

Farrar’s effective list in order: Nicola Willis, Chris Bishop, Paul Goldsmith, Gerry Brownlee, Nancy Lu, Dale Stephens, Mahesh Muralidhar, Katie Milne, Angee Nicholas, and Melissa Lee.

The latest Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll has National at 31%, ahead of Labour on 27.8%, with the Greens at 10.1%, New Zealand First at 9.1%, ACT at 7.3% and Opportunity suddenly above the threshold on 6.1%. On Farrar’s seat calculation, National gets 40 MPs. That is 8 fewer than they won at the 2023 election, when 38.08% of the party vote delivered 43 electorate MPs and 5 list MPs.

Often polls are discussed purely as horse race results. National 31, Labour 27.8, therefore a good National poll. Well, compared with Labour, yes. But Labour having an atrocious result does not magically turn 31% into an impressive one for National. And National’s particular kind of shrinkage is more dangerous because its electorate base is so strong.

Just in case you need a refresher, under MMP the party vote determines the total number of seats a party receives. Electorate winners fill those seats first, and the remaining seats needed to bring the party up to its proportional entitlement based on party vote are then filled from the party’s list.

For example, if Christopher Luxon wins Botany (as is very, very likely), he enters as the MP for Botany. Simeon Brown will almost certainly win Pakuranga, likewise Erica Stanford, Louise Upston, and Mark Mitchell (he won by the largest margin of any MP in 2023 with a 23,376 vote majority in Whangaparāoa). So assuming they all do win their seats, they enter Parliament as electorate MPs and their list ranking becomes irrelevant.

Now we get to the people who actually need the list. And, awkwardly for National, some rather important people are standing in the queue. Nicola Willis is not standing in an electorate so she can only get in via the list. Then Bishop is attempting to defend Hutt South, which he won by just 1,332 votes in 2023, but which has always been difficult terrain for National. Goldsmith may as well be a list-only candidate like Willis as he is standing in Epsom against David Seymour. Then the Speaker himself, Gerry Brownlee, is also relying solely on the list, as is Nancy Lu. I could go on, but the likelihood of anyone further down the list entering Parliament is pretty low.

And this is where MMP gets weird. Normally suggesting that National might quite like to lose a few electorates would be idiotic, but with their deputy leader, ministerial powerhouse, and Speaker all requiring list seats, they will be happy to drop a few so they can take more from the list. The worse National does in electorate contests, the more room there is for its senior list MPs. Chris Bishop’s best insurance policy is one of his colleagues losing their seat. Look out for senior National MPs sitting around the Beehive sticking pins into voodoo dolls of their marginal seat colleagues.

National could run fairly appalling campaigns in seats like Whangaparāoa, East Coast Bays, Selwyn, Kaipara ki Mahurangi, and Pakuranga, and still struggle to lose them. However, where things were already shaky in 2023, and where list MPs might be hoping to see any colour but blue on eleection night, are Banks Peninsula, New Lynn, West Coast-Tasman, Hutt South, Mt Roskill, Wairarapa, and East Coast (now East Cape). But then even if National drops some of them, there is every chance a plucky candidate or two could pick up a seat that National did not win in 2023. For example, in 2023, Labour held Mt Albert, Nelson, Te Atatū, Wigram, Ōhāriu, Taieri, and Christchurch Central by less than 2000 votes. They could easily result in an unwanted victory.

For example, in Nelson, Labour’s Rachel Boyack defeated National’s Blair Cameron by 26 votes in 2023, and they are facing each other again. It is likely it will be another tightly fought race.

Mt Albert could be the electorate on which a lot hinges. It is the most crowded electorate with the potential for a very split vote. Labour’s Helen White embarrassingly beat National’s Melissa Lee by just 18 votes in 2023 after Jacinda Ardern won it with the country’s largest margin the election previous. Labour continue to persist with White but she has proven to be pretty unpopular with Labour voters and after her comments about hoping house values drop she has probably torched another batch of votes.

The Greens’ Ricardo Menéndez March got a decent minority of the votes last time in Mt Albert and he is back to fight in 2026. But it is the arrival of Opportunity leader Qiulae Wong that really puts the cat among the pigeons. It would be smart for Labour to do a cuppa tea deal with Opportunity as it would guarantee them another coalition partner. But they have been emphatic that they will not. So Melissa Lee has a much more possible route into Parliament through Mt Albert than you would think. The left could splinter their chunk of the vote between them and allow her to canter through the middle.

Christchurch Central is in play too with Labour incumbent Duncan Webb retiring. National has Dale Stephens, who is number 23 on its list and 6th on Farrar’s effective list, facing new Labour candidate George Hampton. Stephens was close behind Webb in 2023 and he could well pick the seat up.

And this is where I confess to finding a few of National’s potential electorate losses more appealing than others.

Banks Peninsula is one. Vanessa Weenink won it by only 396 votes in 2023 and faces former Labour MP Tracey McLellan again. Weenink is number 39 on National’s list, so there is no realistic list parachute waiting for her if she loses. I would not exactly be inconsolable if she were to crash out of Parliament. Actually, if I am honest I want her to lose.

Weenink is a former Labour Party member who actually worked on Duncan Webb’s 2017 campaign. She describes herself as socially progressive and fiscally conservative. That social progressivism has seen her behave as an enemy to women rights in Parliament this term with blatant trans activism on display. She has every right to have changed parties, obviously, and she has an impressive background as a doctor and military veteran, but watching her in action this term I have concluded she should never have left Labour.

If any readers (who support National or the coalition) are in the Banks Peninsula they may like to assist Labour in taking the electorate from Weenink because her defeat will help create list space for somebody like Willis, Bishop, Goldsmith, or Brownlee.

East Cape is another seat where I would not regard a National defeat as a tragedy. Dana Kirkpatrick won the old East Coast electorate by 3,199 votes in 2023 and is now ranked only 33rd on National’s list. She faces Labour’s Jo Luxton in the new East Cape electorate who my friends in the farming sector say is actually one of the best of the red bunch. Kirkpatrick too has been weak on womens’ rights and would generally not be a loss to caucus.

That sounds harsh because it is harsh. Elections are brutal. Political parties rank their candidates based on who they most want in Parliament. But MMP ensures that voters do not have to always cooperate with those judgements.

While I am on a tear about traitrous female National MPs, unfortunately it is virtually guaranteed that Nicola Grigg will win Selwyn. Grigg won Selwyn by 19,782 votes in 2023, the third largest general electorate majority in the country. She is ranked 17th on National’s list but could be ranked behind the photocopier in the Parliamentary library and still come back through Selwyn.

Grigg is the Minister for Women, yet she trots out lines from trans activist playbooks and eagerly looks around for pats on the head from the otherside of the House. Readers who have followed me for any length of time will know where I sit on that. A Minister for Women who cannot see the relevance of ensuring the law can reliably identify the class of people her portfolio exists to represent has sold women out. Unfortunately for those of us who might enjoy seeing the electoral consequences of that, Selwyn is one of the safest National seats in the country.

One seat I would like to see National win even though it would add another electorate to the tally, is Auckland Central. Recent polling puts National’s candidate Candace Kinser ahead of incumbent Chloe Swarbrick. On the ground they are hearing that locals just want a decent MP to represent their interests rather than be Minister for Palestine. In Kinser they would certainly receive that.

Kinser has actually done things outside politics. She has run NZTech and Biomatters, headed Palantir's New Zealand operation and worked at Jarden. She has sat around enough board tables too, including the University of Auckland Council and Callaghan Innovation. It is a CV that would outshine a fair number of the people already sitting in Parliament. More importantly for Auckland Central, she understands business and might actually be interested in the increasingly difficult business of making the central city work.

On the other hand, National should be willing to leave Tāmaki to ACT’s James Christmas. It is an electorate they can afford to lose to a coalition partner and a candidate they clearly rate as he was previously touted as National’s future Attorney General. National’s candidate Mahesh Muralidhar is enthusiastic and has hit the campaign hard, but Christmas is a barrister specialising in public law and national security who spent a decade working as a senior adviser to Sir John Key and Sir Bill English, and worked closely with former Attorney General and Treaty Negotiations Minister Chris Finlayson. The latter may be seen as problematic, but my conversations with him suggest that his experience in Treaty matters and his pragmatic approach could be very useful.

I have been clear that I won’t be sharing my party vote before the election as I don’t want to become aligned with one party when I primarily want the coaliton to be returned and to discuss the merits and failings of all three parties. However, I am comfortable sharing that as a Tāmaki constitutent I will be voting for James Christmas (unless he does something supremely dumb between now and November 7). He is a great candidate and it will help National’s list if he wins.

Wasted votes, or a lack thereof, are another factor that will play a massive part this election. In 2023, 5.57% of all party votes went to parties that received no seats and so were “wasted”. Votes cast for parties that fail to qualify for representation are excluded from the pool used to determine proportional representation. The practical effect is that parties which do make it into Parliament receive a larger share of the seats than their party vote percentage suggests. Farrar calculates that National’s 38.1% in 2023 amounted to about 40.3% of the effective vote once wasted votes were removed.

The big question is will Opportunity cross the threshold this time around. They have been hanging around the 5% for several polls and surpassed it in recent ones. That suggests that unlike the chunk of votes that they have received in previous years which have been wasted, they will carry them into Parliament potentially leading to much lower total wastage.

Aside from potentially losing Willis, the Bishop situation is easily the most politically consequential. He has been central to National’s housing, infrastructure, and planning agenda. He is one of the party’s best parliamentary performers and, whenever the ritual speculation about Luxon’s leadership starts again, one of the small handful of names repeatedly discussed as a possible alternative. He has openly acknowledged that he will probably not win Hutt South back, which suggests he has seen some polling we perhaps have not.

So, is “two ticks blue” really the right message for National to be promoting? With its strange combination of local strength and national weakness, National may need to be more nuanced in some electorates. Unless, of course, losing those list MPs is not the crisis for them that I am assuming.

National may finish fractionally ahead of Labour as some polls are showing. It may even be enough, when combined with ACT and New Zealand First, to return the current Government with a slim majority. But 31% is still a poor result for National.

Dropping from 48 seats to around 40 will be difficult to experience as a real win. The fact Labour is currently managing an even more spectacular act of self-immolation does not make National’s problems disappear. A 40 member National caucus would change the power relationship inside a second coalition government. ACT and New Zealand First would have at least 21 seats between and although National would still be the largest partner, it would be less dominant in terms of numbers compared to this term.

Losing several senior ministers at the same time would only magnify that weakness. At National’s current level in the polls there is a perfectly plausible scenario in which National gets exactly 1 list MP. Nicola Willis. That is it. A second term government should normally be more experienced. Ministers have learned their portfolios, relationships with officials have developed, and policy programmes are finally moving into implementation. The Government should enter its second term with institutional memory rather than needing to reconstruct half its front bench.

That’s why the focus should not be on whether Melissa Lee should have been 25th rather than 30th, or whether Gerry Brownlee deserved 9th rather than 7th, or whether National has enough women in its top 20. The focus should be on whether there are any list seats available in the first place. And despite the Prime Minister’s spontaneous declarations, National does not need a different electoral system. It needs more votes.

Ani O'Brien comes from a digital marketing background, she has been heavily involved in women's rights advocacy and is a founding council member of the Free Speech Union. This article was originally published on Ani's Substack Site and is published here with kind permission.