Richard
Shaw, Te
Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa – Massey
University
Did New Zealand just
witness a first-past-the-post election under
MMP?
There was a time when elections were
determined by results in a handful of marginal electorates.
Since the introduction
of MMP in 1996, however, overall voter support for
individual parties has been the deciding factor.
This year, the old days seem to have returned. The
outcome could well hinge
on a small number of close-run seats – just like pre-proportional
elections used to.
Put aside questions about
who will hold the balance of power when final results are
announced on November 27, or whether Christopher Luxon will
go back on his word and negotiate
with the Opportunity Party if he has to.
Deeper
down, the tectonic plates of New Zealand politics are
drifting.
Rumblings in the electoral
system
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The next parliament is going to be the
largest in history. While it generally numbers between 120
and 123 MPs, the overhangs
created on the left and right are so large it could have
as many as 131.
This will be the sixth overhang
since MMP was adopted, but two things set this one apart:
its size and its impact.
The discrepancy between
the parties’ share of the vote and their share of all
parliamentary seats will be distorted. That means it will
affect the formation of the next government.
Without the overhang, provisional results would
have given both National and Labour roughly 36 seats. But
because National’s performance in the electorates exceeded
its showing on the party vote, it currently has 42 seats.
This means National holds 32% of seats in a
131-member parliament to Labour’s 27.5% – even though
the parties are neck-and-neck on the party
vote.
This disconnect between vote share and seat
share is the sort of thing that fuelled New Zealanders’ rejection of
the old first-past-the-post system. In 1978 and 1981,
for instance, Labour secured more votes than National
overall but lost the election because it won fewer seats.
The similarities with the 2026 election are
uncanny: on provisional results Labour’s lead over
National on the party vote is 3,650 votes; in 1981,
Labour’s lead was 4,122.
Negatives for
National
We’ve seen this coming. Both the 2012
MMP Review and the 2023
Independent Electoral Review addressed the overhang
issue. Each recommended abolishing the provision for
overhang seats – and on both occasions National (or
National-led) governments chose not to act on those
recommendations.
While National would rather
return to office than to opposition, the election result
presents the party with significant challenges.
For
one thing, it is now an electorate-only party: voters like
the party’s individual MPs more
than they like the party itself.
That has
never happened to a major party before in the MMP era, and
poses a strategic conundrum for National: does it swing
further right to retake the votes it has shed to ACT and New
Zealand First, or return to the ground it held when it was a
broad-based party of the centre-right?
It’s not
clear what influence the vote-splitting
campaign to deliberately engineer an overhang had on the
results. But there was a reason Luxon called strategic
voting “the
opposite of clever”: it reduces the party’s
influence in coalition negotiations and slashes its presence
in the next cabinet.
National supporters have also
effectively deprived
their own party of three of its most senior and
hard-working ministers. Nicola Willis, Paul Goldsmith and
Chris Bishop carry 18 ministerial portfolios between them
(some of which will go to ACT or New Zealand First ministers
if the same coalition government is eventually
returned).
And should National voters develop a
taste for strategic voting, the party won’t be able to
rely on its list to balance the slate of candidates selected
by the party’s electorate committees.
Local
concerns and national priorities don’t always align.
Political parties use their lists to create the desired mix
of candidates on the basis of competence, experience,
gender, ethnicity and so on.
National’s capacity
to do this has now been hamstrung. Spare a thought for its
campaign manager at the next general
election.
Positives for National
On
the other hand, National’s performance in the electorates
could be a potential long-term advantage.
There is
a strategic case to be made for focusing on electorate
contests (as
Te Pāti Māori has done in the Māori electorates, and
as
some German parties do) – especially if population
growth causes the number of general electorate seats to rise
relative to the number of list seats.
At the first
MMP election, there were 65 electorate and 55 list seats;
last week (and pre-overhang), there were 71 electorate seats
and just 49 list seats.
Unless that ratio is fixed
– also recommended by the 2023 Independent Electoral
Review – the number of electorate seats will keep
increasing as the population grows.
In such
circumstances, a party with a strong electorate presence
(National) could do well, especially if it were to align
itself with other parties (ACT is the obvious choice here)
that concentrate on the party vote.
In this
respect, National is in a much stronger position than
Labour, whose electorate vote is more concentrated across
fewer seats. Labour’s electorate vote is also shrinking as
Labour-leaning
Māori voters shift onto the Māori
roll.
Fixing the system
There are
ways to address
the overhang problem. Most obviously, the electoral law
could be amended to either offset the consequences of
overhangs or remove them entirely.
Remedies might
include abolishing the “coat-tail” provision that
exempts parties from the 5% threshold for entering
parliament if they win a single electorate seat, bringing in
more candidates than their overall vote would otherwise
allow.
The party vote threshold could be lowered,
and the ratio of electorate-to-list seats fixed at 50-50, as
originally recommended by the 1986 Royal
Commission on the Electoral System.
National-led governments have passed up the
opportunity to make these changes before. It seems unlikely
a new one will break with precedent.
Richard
Shaw, Professor of Politics, Te
Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa – Massey
University
This article is
republished from The
Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the
original
article.
