Labour's vote was up by nearly nine per cent meaning Northcote will now feature on its list of marginal and winnable seats for 2020.
One established commentator showed the colour of her petticoat with the loopy assertion that "National was on a roll" but it occurred to me that if this election had happened in Australia it would have been interpreted as a two party shift of in excess of 10 per cent, a triumph for the Labour Party and a career threatening disaster for National's leader, Simon Bridges.
On balance Jacinda Ardern's Labour Party came out the winner if only because the outcome, as spun by National's public relations people, leaves Bridges in place.
The consensus among the governing parties is that Bridges has not made any kind of a splash with the voters and is therefore the preferred opponent for the 2020 general election campaign.
Labour candidate Shannon Halbert has done well and earned himself a winnable place on the Labour Party's list for the 2020 general election.
Penal reform featured heavily in political reports this week with one piece of bad news more than offset by a very positive development.
The bad news was that there will be no immediate repeal of the "three strikes" legislation after NZ First made it clear it would not support repeal at this point.
Given this party's traditional "tough on crime" stance this news was not surprising, and would have been at least in part the result of a poll showing general support for the law even among Green Party voters.
This attitude underlines the widespread belief that harsh punishments and long sentences work well in deterring violent criminals from further offending.
If this were true states in the USA with the death penalty would have much lower murder rates than those without the ultimate punishment. This, regrettably, is not the case and given that a majority of violent offences are committed when the offender is drunk, it's unlikely that violent offenders are considering the three strikes law in the lead-up to their offending.
Support for laws like "three strikes" is not rationally based.
The Prime Minister's former chief science adviser, Sir Peter Gluckman's recent report on rising prison costs contains this telling quote:
"Crime has fallen yet, as noted; the public perception often differs from this reality. Like other issues where scientific evidence is debated, misused or discounted and complex issues are reduced to simple, contradictory positions, law-and-order issues ― and the ways to manage imprisonment ― are infused with advocacy and political posturing. Populist, 'eye-for-an-eye', retributive justice often relate to deeply distressing events."
The good news in the penal reform space is that the Government does not intend to build the 3000-bed mega-prison on the Waikeria site as was planned by the defeated National Government.
Although Sir Bill English bravely called prisons "a moral and fiscal failure" in 2014, that message obviously didn't get through to his Corrections Ministers who planned this atrocity.
Huge prisons become universities of crime, and planners should note that countries with low rates of imprisonment and re-offending tend to have much smaller prisons than New Zealand where the average jail size is more than 600 beds.
Sweden, with its low rate of incarceration and re-offending has, on average, eighty beds per prison.
The decision to demolish Waikeria's top jail and replace it with a modern alternative is the right one and the addition of a 100-bed mental health facility is a bonus.
The same Sir Peter Gluckman report quoted above says: "Nearly all (91 per cent) people in prison in NZ have a lifetime diagnosable mental illness or substance-use disorder, 62 per cent diagnosed in the past 12 months, according to a recent NZ survey."
One hundred beds are not going to cope with this level of need, but it's a good start.
• Mike Williams grew up in Hawke's Bay. He is CEO of the NZ Howard League and a former Labour Party president.
• All opinions are his and not those of Hawke's Bay Today.
