Anti-Labour swing leaves slimmest margin

New Zealand's youngest MP, Darren Hughes, holds Labour's most marginal seat, keeping National at bay by just 226 votes.

Mr Hughes, 27, inherited the Labour seat of Otaki in 2002 with a majority of 7736. On Saturday, as the country swung to the right, eroding Labour's grip on power, Hughes saw his comfortable margin slide.

"A win is a win. That thought is very firmly in my mind," said a jovial Mr Hughes yesterday morning as he headed to a Battle of Britain commemorative church service in Levin.

But he knows exactly where his support went in Otaki: "Despite the fact that times are pretty good for the rural and provincial economy, the opposition-to-Labour vote collapsed into the National Party."

His main opponent was Nathan Guy, who took 16,179 votes to Mr Hughes' 16,405. Labour took the party vote with just 775 more votes than National.

The underlying message has not gone unheeded, adds Mr Hughes, who is Labour's junior whip. And that signal is that voters are perhaps uncomfortable with the speed of social change spearheaded by Labour, among them the arrival of civil unions and prostitution law reform (Mr Hughes voted for both).

The MP says he detected wariness about "moral legislation" while campaigning. Those issues "were only a sliver of what Parliament dealt with in three years, but they did get brought up quite a lot. People were saying there was too much moral legislation."

Mr Hughes also feels that "bad publicity" about rural issues - the so-called "fart tax", and stoushes over land access - also eroded his take. But full credit to the opposition: National, says Mr Hughes, ran a good campaign in Otaki.