KEY POINTS:
Thousands of disillusioned Labour supporters let their party lose on Saturday simply by staying at home.
The Chief Electoral Office said the turnout dropped nationally, although only from 77.1 per cent of the eligible voters in 2005 to 74.7 per cent on Saturday - still a slightly higher figure than in 2002.
The total election-day vote rose by 52,000 because of population growth.
But it dropped in 15 seats that Labour won in 2005, with the four sharpest falls in the Labour heartland of South Auckland.
In Manurewa, where the election-day turnout plunged from 27,111 voters in 2005 to 22,441 on Saturday, Labour MP George Hawkins said the worst declines were in the strongest Labour polling booths in low-income areas such as Clendon.
"They were usually Labour, but for various reasons they didn't want to vote for us. But they didn't want to vote National so they stayed at home," he said.
"The people I talked to - by no means a cross-section - had a variety of reasons, such as time for a change."
He said it was not for lack of trying on Labour's part.
"We had probably more people on the ground than ever before," he said. "We had people phoning on election day asking do they need a ride to the polls, which is something we haven't done before. Helen Clark spent time there in the last week."
National candidate Cam Calder, a doctor who campaigned fulltime in Manurewa for the past six months and has been elected as a list MP, said the biggest concern in the area was crime.
"People thought they had been shamefully treated by the Government that they brought back into power [in 2005]. They thought they were treated with disdain and arrogance," he said.
The biggest drop in turnout was in neighbouring Manukau East, where almost one in five of the 28,848 people who voted last time stayed home, although the picture there is complicated by major boundary changes.
Labour MP Ross Robertson said his election team was about the same size as last time and he held more than 150 street-corner meetings, but there was "a strong undercurrent for change".
Boundary changes were also a factor in the renamed seat of Papakura, where election-day turnout dropped by 13 per cent. National MP Judith Collins said Labour tried hard, wheeling in Helen Clark and Michael Cullen, with "large numbers of people in Labour T-shirts, presumably union organisers, trying to drum up votes".
But her canvassing found traditional Labour voters who were disillusioned with their party but were not prepared to vote National.
More surprisingly, the turnout also dropped by 13 per cent in Mangere, despite Pacific Party leader Taito Phillip Field giving Labour its first real contest in the seat for decades. National candidate Mita Harris said voters might actually have been scared off by the sheer weight of campaigning they were subjected to.
"The [Mangere] market on Saturday, especially in the last three weeks - I think there was no other place like it in New Zealand," he said.
Auckland University political scientist Ray Miller said turnout nationally was on a declining long-term trend reflecting reduced political participation generally. Party membership had dropped from 26.4 per cent of all voters in 1954 to 2.4 per cent in 2002.
"There is very little happening now by way of campaign meetings and door-to-door visits," he said.
Labour's Tamaki candidate Josephine Bartley said there were no joint candidate meetings in Tamaki this year. In Papakura Ms Collins said there were only two.
But the number of joint candidate meetings increased from two or three last time to six or seven this year in Manukau East, and from one to three in Manurewa. There were four joint meetings in Mangere.
