Rodney Hide: Here are Opportunity's opportunities, none of them good

There are two possibilities for the Opportunity Party following the specials. The first is bad for them. That is that the centre-right can form a government without them. The second is even worse. That is that the centre-right needs them.

Let me explain.

Rodney Hide: Nine seats? Try four

Rawiri Waititi was in fine form arriving at Parliament this morning. "If you look at our five seats plus the four overhangs, that's nine seats we've delivered to making sure this is a one-term government," he said.

Nine seats. It's a neat trick. The Māori Party won five electorates. Four of those five are overhang seats. The four overhangs are four of the five. Count them twice and you get nine.

Rodney Hide: Chris Bishop - MMP is bad for democracy

On Saturday night Chris Bishop lost Hutt South. Within days he had decided MMP is bad for democracy.

He told RNZ's Morning Report the country must review its electoral system. The vote-splitting campaign was "horribly" confusing, he said, and the 11-seat overhang, seven to National and four to the Māori Party, is not what MMP's founders had in mind.

(Well, it wasn’t confusing to us. And we don’t know what the founders had in mind. Punish Germany? What they had in mind is not the point; the point is this is the system that we have.)

Rodney Hide: Specials

The specials could sink Luxon's majority. They probably won't.

On election night the centre-right won. National took 42 seats, ACT 13 and NZ First 12. That's 67. Labour, the Greens, Opportunity and Te Pāti Māori have 64 between them.

The House is 131 seats, so a majority is 66. The centre-right has one seat to spare.

One seat is not much. And there are still 399,365 votes to count.

Rodney Hide: Wasted Electorate Votes

It’s not just the party votes for National that were wasted Saturday night. So too were the electorate votes for ACT and New Zealand First.

These votes did not add one extra MP to the centre right. That was 210,914 votes wasted.

And it mattered. The fate of the election may hang on Wairarapa. The margin there is just 139 votes in National’s favour. The specials could flip it. New Zealand First’s Ron Mark got 3,555 votes in that electorate. And didn’t get in. Those votes may well have cost the centre right the election.

Rodney Hide: Glorious

I should not pick on Stuff’s political editor Henry Cooke, but then he’s so target-rich. One day I hope to report that he has something right.

(You may recall I earlier drew attention to his plan that Labour and National should ask the Governor-General to call another election should the government rely on an overhang. He appears to have dropped that idea.)

Rodney Hide: Nine hundred thousand votes

That's how many National party votes there will be once the specials are counted. Every one of them went down the toilet.

On that projection National has 41 electorates. Those party votes entitle it to 34 seats. The extra seven come from the electorates, not from the party vote. Christopher Luxon could have stacked another hundred thousand party votes on the pile and he would not have gained a single MP.

Rodney Hide: The Future

Somewhere this week a team of consultants are finishing a business case for Council for a car park building. It will rest on careful traffic modelling and solid historical data. And in fifteen years it will be empty while the cars that should have filled it are out working.

That's the problem with all government. It drives by the rear-vision mirror.

Rodney Hide: Two votes. Use them.

National Party pollster David Farrar had this to say this week on his blog: "There are two paths back into Parliament for Chris Bishop – a win in Hutt South, or the National Party having at least two list MPs. Both of these paths are looking far from certain right now."

That's about as big an admission that we are going to get that on present polling National will get no list MPs at all. National is polling below 30 percent, which means the 800,000 or so Kiwis who party vote National are not delivering one extra MP. They may as well not tick the party vote box.

Rodney Hide: Election outcome: the real losers won't be on the ballot

Here’s my election night prediction, for what it is worth.

We will get a centre-right government. National will win an overhang. ACT and NZ First will come out on top. Opportunity will not make it into Parliament. The big losers will be the New Zealand media.

The media are finished

Rodney Hide: The limits of cleverness versus capitalism

The following column appeared in the NATIONAL BUSINESS REVIEW October 27th 2017. With the support of Winston Peters, Jacinda Ardern had just been installed as Prime Minister.

Rodney Hide: Hipkins sets the bar, then trips over it

Another day, another Chris Hipkins fact check.

His complaint today (Friday) was that Māori MPs are held to a different standard. And that it was racist. "There is an element of racism in this as well that is just ugly," he said.

Different standard? Whose standard? His.

Rodney Hide: Election Campaign Fact Check: Genocide

Chris Hipkins says there is "an unfolding genocide" in Gaza.

Here's what genocide looks like in numbers:

Rodney Hide: Two votes, one brain

You have two votes. Make them count.

That is the secret of MMP. The party vote decides how many seats each party gets. The electorate vote decides who represents your electorate. Treat them as one vote cast twice and you likely waste half your say. Split them smartly and you can change the government.

I know. I have been the beneficiary.

Rodney Hide: Raw data that isn't raw - Australia catches up with what we were told to ignore

Australians woke last week to a story I knew well. The Australian's Graham Lloyd reported that a forensic audit had found chunks of the Bureau of Meteorology's "raw" temperature data copied and pasted from one period into another.

The standout example is Sydney Observatory. The minimum temperatures shown for August 1867 are the same as those for August 1907. The paper checked the handwritten logbooks at the National Archives. The 1867 numbers online are simply wrong.

Rodney Hide: Henry Cooke wants a do-over if you vote wrong

The Post's political editor, Henry Cooke, has a plan if the MSM’s relentless campaign for the Opportunity Party fails. It’s a simple plan: if you vote the wrong way, you vote again.

https://www.thepost.co.nz/politics/361099333/dirty-deal-chris-hipkins-and-christopher-luxon-should-actually-strike

He says so plainly. He wants Christopher Luxon and Chris Hipkins to promise that "if an overhang is the only path to government, then we'll ask the Governor-General to call another election instead." He says it "would be called a 'dirty deal' between the big two almost immediately."

Rodney Hide: One law for Tamaki, another for the party of October 7

"Bash the Jews. Cut their heads off."

A man shouted that at a pro-Palestinian protest in Auckland in July 2014. It's on video. Dr David Cumin and historian Paul Moon reported to the Herald that the Human Rights Commission didn't think it worth investigating, let alone prosecuting. Its reasoning, as they reported it: no violence followed, so it didn't incite anything.

Remember that reasoning. It's about to become very selective.

Rodney Hide: Everything blew up in Elon Musk's face. Then he made a trillion dollars

You can't hate the media enough.

In April last year RNZ ran a CNN piece headlined "Everything is blowing up in Elon Musk's face".

It was a treat if you loathe the man. Musk was "the world's richest edgelord" (i.e. “someone who intentionally expresses shocking, offensive, nihilistic, or taboo opinions—mostly on internet forums—to appear cool, edgy, or superior rather than from genuine conviction”). He had lost US$100 billion in three months. Voters, customers, investors and the MAGA elite had all decided that "the Elon Musk show has lost the plot".

Rodney Hide: Tamatha Paul has found the immoral ones. She should check the caucus room

Green MP Tamatha Paul has settled the great moral question of the campaign. It is immoral to be a billionaire.

Jack Tame put the question to the two Chrises in Tuesday's TVNZ leaders' debate. Neither said yes. That night Tamatha took to TikTok: "The answer is yes. Here's why."

"Anybody who is a billionaire did not become billionaires because they earned it or because they deserve it." Their wealth "is parasitic. That means it grows and it infects and it eats everything in its path."

Rodney Hide: Raine showed us the lecture room. Here's the staffroom.

John Raine has laid bare what our universities teach students. The University of Auckland's new gender equity plan shows the same machinery aimed at staff: hiring, promotion and annual reviews. No budget, no targets.

"I thought back then that we might quickly pass peak woke and that rationality would have taken hold again by now," writes Emeritus Professor John Raine in The indoctrination must stop but Labour would double down. "Not so fast, some warned - they were right!"