Ani O'Brien: A week is a long time: 14 November 2026

Election 2026: Labour has the most votes. Luxon has the numbers. For now.

Here we are on the other side of the election and things are just as mad, if not madder. As expected we have a kind-of-result, but nothing set in stone. We await the final result on the 27th of November while some are tentatively beginning negotiations, others are indulging in election denialism, and the smartest of them all told the media that he had nothing to say until the votes are officially in and has allegedly gone fishing.

Preliminary numbers have Labour at 29.36% to National’s 29.21% which is a difference of just 3,650. Doesn’t get much tighter than that. However, Labour’s marginal party vote lead means little when MMP has delivered National seven additional overhang seats. Ordinarily National would expect 35 seats on that percentage, but they have won 42 electorates so keep those seats and bring no one in off the list.

So as things are prior to special votes being counted, National have 42 seats, Labour 36, Greens 16, ACT 13, NZ First 12, Opportunity 7, and Te Pāti Māori 5. Four of Te Pāti Māori’s seats are overhang seats also thanks to them getting almost zero party votes (0.57%). That’s a 131 seat Parliament, folks, and 66 are required to form a Government. Currently the right bloc (National, ACT, NZ First) can do that, but only just with 67 seats. The left bloc (Labour, Greens, TPM) have 57 and those self-declared centrists Opportunity have their 7. However, special votes tend to favour the left and it is possible that there will be some shifting in those numbers which would put Opportunity in a kingmaker position.

It seems like all the pundits have been whacking the numbers into their preferred AI tool and the consensus is that it is more likely that we will have the Coalition returned either outright or with Opportunity unless the left is able to pick up two seats and bring in Opportunity. I personally think it is likely they will pick up one.

There are some electorate seats that are hanging in the balance too. National’s Mike Butterick leaders Labour’s Kieran McAnulty by 139 votes in Wairarapa. If that flips after recount and specials National will lose a seat and go to 41, but Labour will not gain a seat as they will lost one of their list seats. MMP. Not quite so close is the battle in Hamilton East where National’s Ryan Hamilton is 456 ahead of Labour’s Georgie Dansey, but it is not out of the realm of possibility that it could change. Even if Wairarapa turns red and a list MP moves from say New Zealand First to the Greens based on a shift in party vote after specials, the left bloc + Opportunity comes up short with 65. The right bloc would also be on 65 and with Opportunity could form a government.

However, there are some seats that could go in less helpful directions for the left. Labour’s Michael Wood (who already has his eyes on leadership) leads National’s Carlos Cheung by 262 votes in Mt Roskill, for example. But there is a particularly interesting MMP quirk up in Te Tai Tokerau as if Greens’ Hūhana Lyndon is able to claw back 436 votes from Te Pāti Māori’s Aperahama Edwards he would be out and TPM (and the left bloc) would lose one of their overhang seats.

There is a lot of water to go under the bridge and all we can really do is wait for 27th November when the Electoral Commission will unceremoniously put out a press release with the final results.

Election 2026: Who is in and who is out?

Because National was unable to bring in anyone off the list, it has meant saying goodbye to senior ministers Nicola Willis, Paul Goldsmith, Chris Bishop, and Speaker Gerry Brownlee. An extraordinary wipe out of experience and knowledge.

The endorsements Chris Bishop received from Winston Peters, Greenie Verity Johnson, (less significantly) yours truly, and others likely aided him in making the contest in Hutt South much more competitive but he ultimately fell short in the historically red seat with Ginny Andersen claiming it back.

In Nelson there was a rematch between National’s Blair Cameron who lost by just 26 votes in 2023 to Labour’s Rachel Boyack. This time, despite the electorate giving Labour more of their party votes, Cameron took the seat by 1,210 and Boyack is out of Parliament. National also welcomes new MPs in former Federated Farmers President Katie Milne representing West Coast Tasman, Jessica Rowe in Kaipara ki Mahurangi, Lloyd Budd in Whāngarei, Emma Chatterton in Papakura, Matthew Paul in Port Waikato, and Mahesh Muralidhar for Tāmaki. ACT’s James Christmas may have lost in Tāmaki, but he gets in on the list as do Paul Henry, Iain Murray, and Antonia Modkova. New Zealand First welcome list MPs Craig Stobo, Taine Randell, and former National MPs Harete Hipango-Brownlie, Alfred Ngaro, and Michael Laws (though things have been a bit up in the air since his gaff just before the election).

On the left, Labour has picked up George Hampton for Christchurch Central, Dominik Yanzick in Wigram, Mananui Ramsden for Te Tai Tonga, and list MPs Chris Flatt, Kingi Kiriona, and Rakesh Naidoo. Craig Renney is currently just in front of Green’s Julie Anne Genter by 140 votes and if he hangs on he will be in. The Greens say goodbye to Mike Davidson, but pick up list MPs Tania Waikato, Craig Pauling, and Rohan O’Neill-Stevens.

And, of course, Opportunity brings Qiulae Wong, Daniel Eb, Jessica Hammond, Kayla Kingdon-Bebb, Eden Skipper, Jodie Kuntzsch, and Sarah Lucas. Incredibly, one of them mentioned on social media that when they met at Parliament on Monday it was the first time they had all met in person.

All up, preliminaries have 35 new MPs (though some have been there before) in Wellington for induction this week.

Election 2026: The Greens got 50,000 more party votes and Harry got the blame

Harry Mowbray would like credit for the right bloc inching over the majority requirement and it turns out Chloe Swarbrick and Chris Hipkins are more than willing to give it to him. Accusations have been flying about “manipulation” of the system and bad boy billionaires getting up to nefarious election stealing antics from their lairs. Never mind Harry is not a billionaire, although he is wealthy. His children are another matter.

Harry seems to have got a tad ahead of himself in his enthusiasm for the overhang as it did not work to the extent that he had hoped. In fact, National’s party vote has remained relatively steady around 29% (with the exception of a few rogue polls) and so they would have been projected to get a 7 seat overhang some months before the election depending on the performance in electorates. As for his claim that the overhang could guarantee a right bloc government “for the foreseeable future” well, bless him, but we can’t even guarantee we will have one at the end of the month!

Everyone seems to be disagreeing on the impact of Harry Mowbray, but let me assure you having met the guy he is a well-meaning hurricane of a human being with a passion for his vision for saving New Zealand. Newsroom’s Dame Anne Salmond sees him as more sinister and responsible for damaging the character of our Parliament, but Stuff’s Luke Malpass is more sanguine making the point about National’s steady polling. And as I say, Swarbrick and Hipkins have all but painted themselves orange and donned wispy blonde wigs as they expressed outrage over Mowbray and co rorting the system.

The funny thing is, it was Te Pāti Māori who pulled off the more successful overhang strategy. No howls of outrage here. TPM explicitly asked its voters to give their party vote to Greens or Labour (though some party members were explicitly saying “Greens”) and my goodness did their supporters listen. Preliminary results show that TPM’s party vote in the Māori electorates fell from 30.4% to just 5.3% and almost all of those went directly to the Greens who went from 9.4% in the Māori electorates in 2023 to 35.9%. Chloe Swarbrick insists the Greens did not endorse the strategy, but they certainly benefitted from it. The “historic win” they have been celebrating is basically attributable to the gains they made in the Māori seats.

Swarbrick’s insistence on the Green’s innocence is hypocritical since she has not extended the same grace to the National Party who ran around bleating “two ticks blue” all campaign and even wheeled out John Key to tell voters that the vote splitting strategy was the “opposite of clever”. It is also a tad rich for her to bemoan vote splitting when her ability to win and retain the seat of Auckland Central depends on it. Without Labour voters (and even some National voters) splitting their vote to give her their candidate vote she would not have her seat. Neither would Tamatha Paul in Wellington Central and Julie Anne Genter in Rongotai in 2023.

I personally have split my vote in every single election I have ever voted in. In my idealistic and naive youth I used to split red and green and since 2020 I have split different combos of the Coalition. It is astounding that the leaders on the left are engaging in such blatantly inconsistent and hypocritical catastrophising about vote splitting only now. The have both expressed ire for Donald Trump, but their rhetoric this week has come right from his playbook.

Election 2026: Chloe goes full conspiracy

Unfortunately, vote splitting isn’t the only thing Swarbrick is blaming for the left bloc currently being behind the right. She has also revived her outrage for the changes the Government made to the Electoral Act in December last year to remove election day enrolment and require everyone to be enrolled 13 days before the big day. She told John Campbell it was “voter suppression” importing another of the American political narratives into New Zealand.

Provisional figures show that 93.7% of eligible adults enrolled which was down from 94.7% in 2023. Marginally. The Government sent out 3.6 million enrolment packs, 2.2 million reminder emails, half a million texts, set up enrolment kiosks in shopping malls, and spent $7 million (as of end of September) on advertising to get people to enrol. Hardly the actions of suppressors.

The change was made because Ardern’s government had brought it in and in a review of the 2023 election the Auditor-General said that on election day alone they had 110,000 enrolments and updates to deal with. They had allowed five days post-election to process these, but it ended up taking 11. It was also argued that it was easier to vote more than once under the system. Most countries around the world do not allow election day enrolment. We are now no longer an anomaly.

None of this has stopped Swarbrick from posting videos to social media in which she repeatedly alleges that the election has been compromised by these changes. She said in one video “of all the dark, dastardly, and nefarious stuff that the Christopher Luxon Government did over the last three years, I think one of the worst was the mask off voter suppression.”

The week Checkpoint doorstepped its own boss

Radio New Zealand was projected to lose $470,000 in the year to June. Instead it lost $11.8 million. Perhaps this explains the rapid and mysterious departure of their chief financial officer last month. It is now likely that 58 people will lose their jobs as the Crown entity struggles to recover financially. Credit to Checkpoint’s Lisa Owen who doorstepped her own CEO Paul Thompson to demand answers. He claimed that internal reporting gave him an inaccurate picture and the scale of the loss only became evident in October. Not good enough for a guy we pay $528,000 a year to be across these things.

On top of this, RNZ’s board approved a $5 million overdraft facility without ministerial approval. Utterly unacceptable. However, the paper trail does show that a director asked the CFO in writing if they needed the minister’s approval and she said “no”. No legal advice was sought.

E tū union is asking the Government to bail out RNZ for the sake of the workers and suggesting that Paul Thompson should be shown the door earlier than his planned exit in December. Caretaker minister Paul Goldsmith has ruled out a financial rescue, but I am with E tū, Paul Thompson should be sacked immediately. The board should also be cleaned out. This is a case of gross incompetence, ignoring Crown instructions to reduce spending, and failure to keep the minister informed. I’m looking into this further and will likely have more for you soon.

Nine days at work, five years on full pay

In other bureaucratic balls-up news, the Public Service Commission has found that the Ministry of Justice had grounds to get rid of former Lotto presenter Russell Harrison and had accepted flawed advice that the employment matter had to wait for his criminal case to conclude. Harrison had been at the ministry for about two weeks when he was charged with money laundering and participating in an organised crime group. Because they suspended him with full pay, he was able to collect between $500,000 and $550,000 as he sat at home awaiting his day in court. It was in his interest to keep waiting for his trial date as he was being paid and late in the piece he pleaded guilty to money laundering and the second charge was withdrawn.

Get this, he even got pay increases and cashed up annual leave!

Low level managers did raise concerns, but higher up the chain they feared the prospect of appearing in their own court system over a legal technicality. Secretary Justice Andrew Kibblewaite says his ministry has owned the mistake and has declined to resign. Accountability in the public service continues to be missing in action.

Thirty years of penance for the Labour member who accidentally ended up a National MP

After losing her Banks Peninsula seat to Labour’s Tracey McLellan by more than 2000 votes, National’s Dr Vanessa Weenink has given a rather public exit interview. The self-described “squishy centrist” is relieved to be out of the Coalition, has had a gutsful of ACT, and reckons National may need “the next ten terms” to make up for the Treaty Principles Bill.

She also says that National has been pulled too far to the right (news to me) and said that while door knocking New Zealanders told her they hate National. She is in a pretty red electorate and I find it difficult to view her opinion on the political compass of the National Party when she is a very recent convert. She actually campaigned for Labour’s Duncan Webb just two elections ago and tried to be selected as a Labour candidate. After missing out she made the leap over to National.

Personally, she was one of the Nats I was hoping would lose her seat. She undermined the Coalition’s attempts to ban puberty blockers and bring sanity to schools, practically acting like a trans activist in select committees. After these post-election remarks we have more insight into the roadblocks National MPs were facing inside their own caucus. Funnily enough, she says she has been approached by the Opportunity Party. Perhaps third party is a charm.

Defence Force drama that two inquiries couldn’t sort out

Tony Davies resigned as Chief of Defence Force last month acknowledging that he had had an inappropriate relationship while in command some years ago. The younger woman under his command has confirmed the relationship to the media. Former Chief of Air Force John Hamilton had previously ordered one of two inquiries that looked into allegations of the affair previously and he has expressed frustration that people on units who knew something hadn’t been willing to take it up the chain. Both inquiries were unable to substantiate the allegations because of this.

According to New Zealand Herald reporting, a former aviator who was interviewed for one inquiry had kept a nine page complaint that she drafted in 2005, but never submitted. She says she had already raised concerns and felt that this had hurt her career. She had little confidence that contributing to the inquiry would achieve anything. Hamilton’s successor Kevin Short has acknowledged how difficult it would have been for a junior woman to speak openly against her commander.

So despite these inquiries, Davies went on to head the Air Force and then the entire Defence Force. Inspector-General of Defence Timothy Brewer is considering proposed terms of reference and whether to open a formal investigation, while the Public Service Commission is separately reviewing Davies’ appointment.

🇬🇧 Brand goes to prison, Walliams loses his injunction, and the man who still can’t be named

Taking things up a notch, the British media and entertainment sector have much bigger problems. Particularly the BBC. Proving they learnt absolutely nothing from Jimmy Saville and Rulf Harris, we now have another generation of sex predators being exposed. At least these ones are young enough to face the music before they kick the bucket.

Russell Brand has been sentenced to 10 and a half years in prison of which he will have to serve two thirds before being eligible for parole after being found guilty of rape and sexually assaulting three other women. There are at least two other separate rape allegations being investigated by the police and the media claim they have the stories of at least six more complainants on top of that. Sadly, many have leapt to his defence and are pointing to conspiracy theories. This is despite plenty of contemporaneous evidence for the rape he was found guilty of by a jury that was made up of more men than women. He also spent decades telling us all that he was a predator and even writing about his ploys in his books.

One of the rape complainants (there was not enough evidence for him to be found guilty of the this one) met him before he was famous and testified in court that she thought he was gay and that they were going to hang out to talk about activism (they met at a Labour Party conference). In one of his books he talks about how he acts gay to get girls and in an interview he described how he lulls women into a false sense of security with his campness and then “bang pregnant, bang pregnant…”

There is an old recording of Brand with David Walliams, of Little Britain and Britain’s Got Talent fame, joking on a talk show about the advantages of women thinking they are gay. “Isn’t it a wonderful smokescreen?” Walliams said. He lost his High Court bid this week to stop The Guardian and ITN reporting allegations that he sexually assaulted a 15 year old and used his fame to groom teenage girls. Again, his behaviour was an open secret with Jonathan Ross even joking at the 15th Comedy Awards that “like all 15 year olds it is drunk, it’s unpredictable, and it’s probably going home with David Walliams.”

Walliams attempted to silence the media by claiming to the courts that he would kill himself if the allegations were made public. Turns out you can’t use psychological abuse tactics on the High Court.

And now it has emerged in the past few days that there is a third man who has obtained an injunction preventing reporting of allegations against him. It will be interesting if like Walliams his identity is revealed. But concerningly there is no shortage of well-known plausible candidates and speculation is rife. There seems to have been a cabal of leftist comedians whose sexual predation was enabled by the establishment. The Labour Party have this week expelled David Walliams and Russell Brand made the move to the MAGA right in America after exhausting his political connections in Britain.

🇺🇸 The Spy Who Shagged Me: Nvidia boss resigns after affair with potential spy

I don’t know how this week’s wrap up became such a woeful tale of indiscretions and sex crimes, but here we are. Founder and President of one of the world’s most valuable companies, Nvidia, has resigned and Finance Chief Colette Kress is stepping in on an interim basis. He ran the company for 33 years. This resulted from allegations of an affair Huang had with with Alice Huang (no relation one hopes!) which he has acknowledged. It turns out that Alice is suspected of having links to Chinese Intelligence by the US agencies. China denies this, but it is not particularly surprising that they would want intel on the President of the chip company. Then allegations of an affair with Nvidia Vice-President Kimberly Powell emerged, and a third affair is doing the rumours rounds.

Jensen has been married to his wife Lori for 41 years. They met at university where they were lab partners long before he founded Nvidia and made his billions. In fact, Lori earned more than him early in their careers in engineering. She became more involved in their family’s philanthropic work as the the President of the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Foundation which has net assets of more than $9 billion. They have two adult children.

🌏 Have you tried turning the world off and on again?

Yesterday, Microsoft Outlook went down along with other parts of Microsoft 365 causing much joy, frustration, and chaos around the world. Everyone got a reality check about how much of their work relies on Microsoft. Courts, health systems, banks, and private companies all suddenly had to figure out how to do without key communications infrastructure.

Microsoft is not being particularly forthcoming with the diagnostic details but they have said there was a “recent network change” and that servers were failing automated health checks. They have not established what has triggered this, but the company says there is no indication of malicious activity.

Two arrests three years later

Two days before his second birthday Baby Ru suffered the head injuries that killed him. After three years of stonewalling by the three adults who were in the house and could be responsible for his death, police have arrested a man and a woman and charged both with perverting the course of justice. The man is accused of removing and disposing of a CCTV system from the Poole Street house in Taitā on the day Ru died. His lawyer says he will plead not guilty. And still nobody has been charged with Ru’s murder.

🇩🇪 The world’s most famous little grifter drops the mask

A video is doing the rounds in which someone tells Greta Thunberg that a Fridays for Future protest is taking place in Berlin. This is the protest movement that she began and which resulted in her standing on the international stage scolding us all “how dare you!” Upon learning that school kids still take part in the protests she began, Thunberg exclaimed mockingly “Really? They still do that?” and dissolved into laughter with her friend before asking for filming to cut.

You see, Greta has moved on to trendier pastures. She now wears keffiyehs and boards flotillas to Gaza instead of marching for the climate. Though given her predictions for our demise have come and gone perhaps her diminished concern is understandable.

Goodbye, Dai

New Zealand comedian Dai Henwood died on Tuesday in Auckland City Hospital, holding the hands of his family. He was just 48 years old and had been battling bowel cancer since 2020. Thinking of his wife Jo, their two children, and the rest of his friends and family.

Personally, I appreciate the kindness that Dai showed me privately more than a decade ago when I was cancelled and viciously mobbed online. He checked in with me regularly and his kind words were a comfort in some pretty dark and lonely times. We never met in person, but he was a friend when I needed one. I will not forget it.

His management has asked anyone wanting to do something in his memory to consider a donation to the United North Piha Lifeguard Service.

In short — other stuff that happened

• 🇺🇸 A US Army guard told Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and those he was with to be quiet as they posed for photographs at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on Veterans Day. Hegseth has subsequently presented the guard, Specialist Thomas Iglesias, with a Joint Service Commendation Medal.

• Some schools had to switch to paper (shock horror!) after a fault disrupted the digital NCEA Level 2 English exam. NZQA said affected students would receive the higher of either the exam result or their previous practice grade.

• 🇦🇺 A Victoria Police helicopter crew found a missing 17 year old alive in a creek bed after 6 days in the bush. William survived on one packet of chicken chips and sang John Denver’s ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’ to himself at night.

• Opportunity leader Qiulae Wong has acknowledged she got it wrong when she said that New Zealand is one of only 7 countries still using bottom trawling. Yale’s 2026 Environmental Performance Index records 104 countries whose fleets reported catches from bottom trawling or dredging.

• 🇸🇦 Esther Wanja Muthoni, a Kenyan domestic worker in Saudi Arabia, has been sentenced to 100 lashes for giving birth outside of marriage.

• 🇦🇺 Victoria Police say there is insufficient evidence to charge four Sydney Swans AFL players over an alleged sexual assault at a Melbourne Hotel earlier this year. A lawyer for one of the women said his firm is preparing a civil claim.

• Areto Labs examined almost 150,000 social media comments across 34 New Zealand candidate and campaign accounts between 1 August and 6 November. It classified 5.1% of comments directed at women candidates as extremely abusive compared with 2.4% for men.

• 🌏 Russia and Ukraine agreed to another prisoner exchange after US envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff met with Vladimir Putin in Moscow and Volodymyr Zelensky in Dublin. There are reportedly thousands of prisoners to be exchanged.

• Mackenzie District Council has appointed an external investigator to examine allegations against Mayor Scott Aronsen by a council employee. The nature of the allegations has not been made public.

• 🇺🇸 Governor Gavin Newsom announced on November 5 that he will commute all 548 state death sentences to life without parole in California.

• Christopher Luxon and Trade Minister Todd McClay will attend the APEC leaders’ meeting in Shenzhen on 18 and 19 November and Winston Peters will attend the East Asia Summit in the Philippines on 16 and 17 November. The Opposition was consulted as per caretaker government conventions.

• A mother who deliberately kept her child sick was sentenced to 6 years in prison at the High Court in Nelson. The child endured 28 hospital admissions, 13 operations, and 1,038 lab tests.

• 🇺🇸 A doctor fatally shot building manager James Stuart in a Washington DC gym, then shot four other people from his apartment patio. Court records show that he had sued the building’s management over mould and water damage in his flat.

• Male Survivors Aotearoa’s Ken Clearwater and Green co-leader Marama Davidson have asked Police Minister Mark Mitchell to reopen a 1980s Dunedin investigation into alleged organised sexual abuse involving people in public office.

• From 12 November, parents cannot be granted New Zealand residence while a dependent child is in the country without a valid visa. Immigration Minister Erica Stanford made the decision in October and Greens’ Ricardo Menéndez March is making a lot of noise about it now despite it being expected to affect fewer than 35 applications a year.

• A 31 year old man was sentenced to 5 months in prison for indecent assault after pulling down a stranger’s trousers and touching his bottom while the victim was play fighting with children. Judge Gene Tomlinson accepted that the assault had no sexual motive, but the presence of the children meant the victim could not respond.

• Former Reserve Bank Governor and self-appointed financial Tāne Mahuta, Adrian Orr has joined the international advisory committee of the China Investment Corporation, the sovereign wealth fund that manages part of China’s foreign exchange reserves.

Stuff you might find interesting this week



Before accusing the centre-right of gaming the system, the left should check out its own vote-splitting ‘rorts’

Ani O’Brien  9 Nov
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Grand Coalition: Stabiliser or Suicide?
Ani O’Brien 11 Nov

Businessman Guy Haddleton would like Christopher Luxon and Chris Hipkins to sit down together before either of them starts negotiating with any of the smaller parties. While I have no objections to the two major parties hashing out some of the gnarlier long term challenges we face, like infrastructure, our ageing population, and housing, the suggestion …  

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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.