On the night, Labour won 3,650 more party votes than National but six fewer seats. Preliminary results give National and its coalition partners – ACT, a classical liberal party, and New Zealand First, a populist one – 67 seats, one more than they need in a Parliament of 131 MPs.
That lead owes much to tactical voting by National Party voters. And it may yet rescue a prime minister who had failed to heed the lessons of his party’s recent successful past.
New Zealand’s mixed-member proportional voting system – known as MMP – is not for the faint-hearted. Each voter has two votes. The first is for an electorate MP. The second for their preferred party. The party vote decides each party’s share of Parliament’s standard 120 seats. Parties top up their electorate MPs with “list” MPs until they reach that share.
National’s 29 per cent of the party vote was enough for about 35 seats, but its candidates won 42 electorates. A party keeps every electorate it wins, so National’s seven extra seats are added on top of the 120 as an “overhang.” Te Pāti Māori, the Māori party, adds four more, having won five electorates on less than 1 per cent of the party vote. National gets no list seats, leaving out the senior politicians who depended on them.
Many National supporters split their two votes for tactical reasons. They backed their National electorate MP but gave their party vote to one of National’s coalition partners, ACT or New Zealand First. Some centre-right commentators had urged exactly that. Luxon, whose senior ministers depended on the list, warned voters against it. If the coalition’s majority holds, its voters will have saved the government by ignoring the prime minister’s advice.
National cannot blame the system for needing its voters to rescue it.
Tactical voting aside, its own support collapsed. For the first time since New Zealand adopted MMP in 1996, neither National nor Labour reached 30 per cent. Their combined 58.6 per cent is the lowest under the system. Labour’s share rose by more than two points on 2023, while National’s fell by almost nine.
On election night National MPs were already blaming a global tide running against the centre-right. The tide may be real enough. Australia’s Liberal Party has experienced it only too well. Meanwhile, Britain’s Conservatives fell to 23.7 per cent in 2024 as Reform rose. And Germany’s Christian Democratic Union languishes in the polls behind the Alternative für Deutschland.
Yet, in the decade after the global financial crisis, when traditional conservative parties began to falter around the world, New Zealand’s centre-right story had been different.
National under John Key and Bill English, its prime ministers from 2008 to 2017, won between 44 and 47 per cent at four elections in a row. English won 44.4 per cent in 2017, the year after Brexit and President Trump’s first victory.
The Key/English governments found a ready audience for traditional centre-right reforms. In 2010, they raised the goods and services tax from 12.5 per cent to 15 per cent to pay for income tax cuts. They overhauled welfare. They privatised. And they took the books back to surplus by 2015, within six years of the global financial crisis and the devastating Christchurch earthquakes. Key sold reform as common sense. English made the numbers add up. And voters felt it. On the OECD’s figures, average real wages rose 9.5 per cent between 2008 and 2017.
The National-led coalition government under Luxon has not had such a clear idea of what it stands for. It has run one of the larger structural deficits in the developed world. Public debt has ballooned. There have been some supply-side reforms, especially for housing affordability and education, but no privatisations, despite an unfunded infrastructure deficit. And Luxon and Willis have waged a relentless populist campaign against big business – not a common feature of centre-right governments.
National went into this campaign leading with “No new taxes,” a promise most centre-right voters might admire. But it was baldly negative – a promise not to do something rather than a plan to do anything. Nor do voters feel better off. Unemployment reached 5.7 per cent in the September quarter, the highest in 11 years, and inflation is nudging 4 per cent.
Luckily for Luxon, most of the votes National lost went to its partners. New Zealand First gained most, rising from 6.1 to 9.8 per cent, while ACT rose from 8.6 to 10.9.
If the special votes are kind, Luxon will have three years to give those voters a reason to come back.
Roger Partridge is chairman and a co-founder of The New Zealand Initiative and is a senior member of its research team. He led law firm Bell Gully as executive chairman from 2007 to 2014. This article was sourced HERE
New Zealand’s mixed-member proportional voting system – known as MMP – is not for the faint-hearted. Each voter has two votes. The first is for an electorate MP. The second for their preferred party. The party vote decides each party’s share of Parliament’s standard 120 seats. Parties top up their electorate MPs with “list” MPs until they reach that share.
National’s 29 per cent of the party vote was enough for about 35 seats, but its candidates won 42 electorates. A party keeps every electorate it wins, so National’s seven extra seats are added on top of the 120 as an “overhang.” Te Pāti Māori, the Māori party, adds four more, having won five electorates on less than 1 per cent of the party vote. National gets no list seats, leaving out the senior politicians who depended on them.
Many National supporters split their two votes for tactical reasons. They backed their National electorate MP but gave their party vote to one of National’s coalition partners, ACT or New Zealand First. Some centre-right commentators had urged exactly that. Luxon, whose senior ministers depended on the list, warned voters against it. If the coalition’s majority holds, its voters will have saved the government by ignoring the prime minister’s advice.
National cannot blame the system for needing its voters to rescue it.
Tactical voting aside, its own support collapsed. For the first time since New Zealand adopted MMP in 1996, neither National nor Labour reached 30 per cent. Their combined 58.6 per cent is the lowest under the system. Labour’s share rose by more than two points on 2023, while National’s fell by almost nine.
On election night National MPs were already blaming a global tide running against the centre-right. The tide may be real enough. Australia’s Liberal Party has experienced it only too well. Meanwhile, Britain’s Conservatives fell to 23.7 per cent in 2024 as Reform rose. And Germany’s Christian Democratic Union languishes in the polls behind the Alternative für Deutschland.
Yet, in the decade after the global financial crisis, when traditional conservative parties began to falter around the world, New Zealand’s centre-right story had been different.
National under John Key and Bill English, its prime ministers from 2008 to 2017, won between 44 and 47 per cent at four elections in a row. English won 44.4 per cent in 2017, the year after Brexit and President Trump’s first victory.
The Key/English governments found a ready audience for traditional centre-right reforms. In 2010, they raised the goods and services tax from 12.5 per cent to 15 per cent to pay for income tax cuts. They overhauled welfare. They privatised. And they took the books back to surplus by 2015, within six years of the global financial crisis and the devastating Christchurch earthquakes. Key sold reform as common sense. English made the numbers add up. And voters felt it. On the OECD’s figures, average real wages rose 9.5 per cent between 2008 and 2017.
The National-led coalition government under Luxon has not had such a clear idea of what it stands for. It has run one of the larger structural deficits in the developed world. Public debt has ballooned. There have been some supply-side reforms, especially for housing affordability and education, but no privatisations, despite an unfunded infrastructure deficit. And Luxon and Willis have waged a relentless populist campaign against big business – not a common feature of centre-right governments.
National went into this campaign leading with “No new taxes,” a promise most centre-right voters might admire. But it was baldly negative – a promise not to do something rather than a plan to do anything. Nor do voters feel better off. Unemployment reached 5.7 per cent in the September quarter, the highest in 11 years, and inflation is nudging 4 per cent.
Luckily for Luxon, most of the votes National lost went to its partners. New Zealand First gained most, rising from 6.1 to 9.8 per cent, while ACT rose from 8.6 to 10.9.
If the special votes are kind, Luxon will have three years to give those voters a reason to come back.
Roger Partridge is chairman and a co-founder of The New Zealand Initiative and is a senior member of its research team. He led law firm Bell Gully as executive chairman from 2007 to 2014. This article was sourced HERE
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