Less than 24 hours before, Luxon and National supporters had been bopping their heads to an AI-generated attack song lampooning Wong’s alleged desire to tax the life out of the country. Last night, when some of National’s supporters booed, Luxon talked them down: “no, no, we won’t do that, it’s not the Kiwi way”.
What a difference a brush with political death makes. Luxon knows; he’s had two this year already.
That brings us nicely to Bishop, whose name was not mentioned. Luxon ran through every single National MP who had lost their seat that evening in list order, but when he came to Bishop’s name, he skipped it – a clear snub of the man who was not so secretly out to roll Luxon this year, fearing a catastrophic election loss, and who has been proved right by these results.
The coalition may still win the election, but National has quite emphatically lost. While supporters at the election-night party on Auckland’s Viaduct were hopeful that the coalition had a clear path to power, they also knew the party was in serious trouble.
National is a shadow of the broad church of the Key-English-Bridges years, and its large overhang skews heavily in favour of conservative, less diverse candidates.
It has been promising to modernise and diversify since before Tova O’Brien took her camera to the party’s caucus corridor in 2020 and asked the leadership how many Māori sat on its front bench. That modernisation goal looks to have taken a significant step backwards on these results.
And what tight results: Labour is ahead by a minuscule 3650 votes, with 29.36% of the vote compared to 29.21%, making this by far the closest the parties have been in the MMP era.
For all of that, however, National and the coalition wake up today feeling just a wee bit more comfortable than Labour and its leader Chris Hipkins.
You got a sense of that on election night. While Luxon’s speech wasn’t a victory speech, at no point did it grapple with the idea that National might lose.
Hipkins’ speech actually contemplated a loss, noting that were Labour to lose the election, it would “continue to stand up for the people who need a strong voice in Parliament and work every day to earn the confidence of New Zealanders”.
On the election-night numbers, National’s enormous overhang means the coalition can continue to govern, even though Opportunity managed to enter Parliament. That defies some predictions (including from me) that were Opportunity to make it to Parliament, it would be hard for the coalition to govern again.
But that majority is tiny. The coalition has 67 seats of the 66 required to govern in a 131-seat Parliament, a two-seat majority. And yes, you read that right, our Parliament, which should have about 120 seats, has 131 on these numbers, thanks to enormous overhangs on the left and right.
Two of the seats that National is relying on to prop up the overhang are held by tiny majorities. Mike Butterick is just 149 votes ahead of Labour’s Kieran McAnulty in Wairarapa, and Ryan Hamilton is just 456 votes ahead of Georgie Dansey in Hamilton East.
A good rule of thumb is that a majority of less than 300 is easily reversible on special votes, with a majority of 300–500 somewhat vulnerable.
With special votes tending to break left, those two seats could flip. But because National has an overhang, losing both electorates would reduce the size of Parliament from 131 to 129, rather than giving Labour two additional seats. On the current party-vote figures, the coalition would retain a majority, albeit by just one seat.
National’s next most vulnerable seat, Whangārei, has a majority of over 1000, making it less vulnerable to flipping.
The final count, including special votes, will be released on November 27.
Labour, the Greens and Opportunity could all see their party-vote shares rise on special votes, while Act and NZ First could see theirs fall. This reshuffling of the list seats could see, in fact seems likely to see, that coalition majority shift, either in the direction of a hung Parliament or in favour of the Labour-Green-Te Pāti Māori and, maybe, Opportunity bloc – just.
There’s reason to believe the changes after special votes are counted might be smaller this election than in previous elections. The Electoral Commission estimates there are about 399,365 including 96,947 overseas and dictation votes yet to be counted. That compares with over 600,000 special votes in 2023.
Put simply, a lot has to go the left’s way in the special votes to even put the bloc in contention. This isn’t impossible, in fact, if history is any indicator, the special votes will help the left. It’s just difficult, and even if it all goes the left’s way, it will still have a tiny majority even with the help of Opportunity.
This is where the election becomes all about how Opportunity decides to think about forming a government. The party is in both a wonderful and terrible position.
Luxon quite clearly will make the call to Wong to talk about forming a government. He’s said he won’t, but he will. A broad coalition of senior members of his own party, including loyalist Mark Mitchell and disloyalist Erica Stanford, made that clear on Saturday night: either he picks up the phone, or they pick up the knife.
Even if special votes don’t change the final result and National holds on to its majority, it’s far, far too thin for comfort. A loose confidence-and-supply deal with Opportunity would give the coalition some breathing space.
In a way, that would be best for Opportunity too. If Wong has no option to go left, if changing the government is taken off the table completely, then it will be far easier to explain to her supporters why she decided to go right.
It may actually be better for Wong if she weren’t kingmaker this election, if she doesn’t crown as king a man that neither her supporters nor the country at large particularly want to lead them. It may be much safer for her if the choice is simply whether to negotiate a stable or an unstable majority for the coalition.
In fact, it would be proof of concept for Opportunity’s promise to try and extract wins from whoever is in government, a point Wong made during her TVNZ debate when she pointedly told Chloe Swarbrick about all the things she could have done or stopped had the Greens swallowed their pride and governed with National.
However, if the specials break the way we think they will, there’s a chance that a path opens up for the left too. A leftward swing opens up the prospect of a hung Parliament, and if the left has a very, very good run on the specials, Labour, the Greens, Te Pāti Māori and Opportunity could potentially form a government with a one-seat majority.
Opportunity quite plainly has more in common with this bloc than the right.
It’s progressive in terms of policy, and the party, campaigning for unity and against division and getting money out of politics, was quite clearly positioning itself against the cashed up, bombastic, often divisive culture fostered by the coalition.
This sort of angry, open, almost daily confrontation is simply not how recent left-wing coalitions, like the one led by Jacinda Ardern in 2017, have tended to do things.
The challenge is that this bloc, even with Opportunity, would likely have the tiniest of majorities after specials, maybe one or, at a stretch, two seats.
In 1996 and 2005, governments were formed with these tiny majorities, but in each case the government of the day had a friend outside the government that could be relied upon if things went pear-shaped. Act could be relied on to help National in 1996 (which it did, eventually) and the Greens, if necessary, might have helped Labour in 2005 if required.
The left doesn’t have that this time. It also has a problem in the form of Te Pāti Māori, which can’t be relied upon for stability.
The party split this term and can’t be relied upon not to split again – two of the MPs in the caucus that will be heading to Parliament openly flirted with joining the rebellion this term. In another world, the left might hope that the party that destabilised the coalition would be booted from Parliament, but Te Pāti Māori’s strength in the Māori seats means it’s a problem the left can’t easily shake. A majority of any size that depends upon Te Pāti Māori isn’t actually a majority at all – it’s a ticking time bomb.
The story of these numbers isn’t so much that the right has a path to power, even though it does. The actual story is that the left really doesn’t have a path, or not a stable one. And rather troublingly for Opportunity, it puts the party in a position of looking like it has a choice when it really doesn’t.
That’s a challenge. Opportunity’s results suggest its supporters want change. The party’s best party-vote performance was in Wellington North, where it polled 15.09%, more than double its national party-vote percentage of 5.96%. Its next-best result was in Wellington Bays, where it polled 12.47%.
It’s reasonable to assume these electorates, battered by the coalition’s public service cuts, voted to change the government and would be none too pleased were Opportunity to prop up the coalition.
Opportunity might not be able to give them the change they crave, although Wong can reasonably argue that had these voters simply gone to Labour and the Greens, they wouldn’t have changed the government either.
There are wins Opportunity could give these supporters: the coalition plans to cut the public service by about 9000 roles in the coming years, saving $2.8 billion. Few think the coalition can actually achieve this in full.
Perhaps the coalition can use Opportunity as an excuse to water down or wriggle out of a difficult promise, and Opportunity can use it as a win for its public service supporters?
But there are so many other challenges. Opportunity wants significant campaign finance reform, but the coalition parties survive on their big donations – they out-fundraised the left considerably this term. Imagine how badly things would have gone if they hadn’t had all that money behind them? The parties are already on the floor. They won’t want to put themselves further at risk.
And then there’s NZ First. Recent days have suggested that Winston Peters might be keen to get Michael Laws out of the party, either by persuading him not to take his seat or waka-jumping him.
Opportunity will like that, but NZ First is basically the political wing of the commercial fishing industry. It’s very difficult to see how the party comes around to working with Opportunity, which wants to slowly ban bottom trawling.
NZ First’s only option here is to turn to its backers and say they’d come off even worse if Opportunity went with Labour.
The fact that these scenarios need stating speaks to the poor performance of both major-party campaigns. Luxon and his campaign chairman, Simeon Brown, will have serious questions to answer about the decisions they made in this campaign.
Its relentless negativity and childishness have driven National to the point at which it may form a government with the lowest party-vote share of any major party under MMP. It’s only managed to do this through the overhang, a weird electoral trick. Neither man should lead National into the next election.
Labour has questions to ask too. Based on polling, it’s shed party vote this year, tumbling from the mid-30s to the high 20s, ending the night less than three points higher than it was after the disastrous 2023 result.
It lost electorates it should have won, like Nelson (largely thanks to the Greens not splitting their votes), and Wairarapa, which was contested by campaign chairman McAnulty. He may still flip the seat on special votes but should have performed better given high-profile NZ First candidate Ron Mark split the vote on the right.
The other big unanswered question about this election is what it means for the future of the overhang. Both Te Pāti Māori and National have exploited it (although it’s unclear whether National’s overhang is a natural byproduct of its party vote crashing or a result of a deliberate campaign).
There’s a strong case for Labour and National to work together to stop overhangs deciding elections in future. Neither side wins if they become a permanent feature of our elections.
But that’s all in the future.
For now, the political landscape ever so slightly favours the right, and the night’s big winner is Opportunity and Wong. She should enjoy the victory. What she’s achieved tonight, getting a party into Parliament that was not an offshoot of one already there, has not happened before in the history of MMP.
But be warned, the minor parties currently in Parliament have found it very, very difficult to stay there.