Voters on the loose transform the political landscape

By SIMON COLLINS

Was it, as Helen Clark said on Saturday night, "a no-change election" in which the left and right ended up almost exactly where they started?

Or will the 2002 election go down in history as the turning point, when New Zealanders finally threw off the two-party mindset and embraced the kind of fluid multi-party democracy that the rest of the democratic world has known for years?

The bizarre and extraordinary progress of the election campaign - with Labour, the Greens, NZ First and finally United Future soaring skywards in successive weeks - demonstrated a multi-pronged volatility unknown under the first-past-the-post system.

But if you look only at the final result, Clark is also right.

The broad left (Labour, Greens, Alliance, Progressive Coalition, Mana Maori and the Legalise Cannabis Party) ended up with 51.7 per cent of the vote, barely changed from 53 per cent in 1999.

The broad right (National, NZ First, Act, United Future, Christian Heritage) scored 45.8 per cent last time and 46.9 per cent this time.

On the face of it, Saturday's result consolidated the left's huge gain at the last election. The time before, in 1996, it managed 40.1 per cent against the right's 58.5 per cent.

Polling throughout the past two years has confirmed that Helen Clark's Labour Government has enjoyed a popularity rare in New Zealand politics.

With a record dairy payout and the lowest unemployment for 13 years, a Herald sounding at the start of the campaign found that 48 per cent of New Zealanders rated the state of the country as "good" or better, and a further 33 per cent said it was "OK".

In the final Herald-DigiPoll sampling last week, 56.7 per cent said the Government was "moving on in the right direction", against 31.2 per cent who said it was not.

Labour's 41.4 per cent support on Saturday was its highest in any election for 15 years.

For National, the result was catastrophic.

The party's previous worst was 30.5 per cent in 1999. On Saturday it collapsed to 21.1 per cent - a result was so bad as to almost wipe out the distinction between "major" and "minor" parties, certainly in some demographic groups.

Combined with a steep drop in voter turnout, to 68.7 per cent of those enrolled in Auckland, National's vote in Auckland almost halved, from 166,815 in the final 1999 result to 86,510 - 19.7 per cent of the vote - on election night this year.

Among the over-sixties, NZ First (16 per cent in last week's Herald-DigiPoll) almost equalled National (17 per cent).

In Maori seats, National's 4.1 per cent put it fourth after Labour, NZ First and the Greens.

In the Herald-DigiPoll, admittedly with a high margin of error, it was third among Chinese voters with 23.1 per cent, despite having the only Chinese MP, Pansy Wong.

Labour and Act each won 38.5 per cent of Chinese voters in the poll.

What was most unprecedented in this election was not the final result, but the fickleness of public opinion during the election campaign.

Labour peaked in late June at 52.1 per cent. One in five of the people who supported it then had deserted it by election day.

The Greens peaked in mid-July at 11.3 per cent, then lost almost half their supporters in the last two weeks.

Only NZ First and United kept their big spurts for the last fortnight, both winning more votes on Saturday than they had scored in any Herald-DigiPoll for years.

Ironically, the most stable party was National, which slid ever-so-gradually but consistently from 24.6 per cent in late June to its closing 21.1 per cent.

The volatility was among all other parties, as those who were not trying to change the Government shuffled their intended votes around wildly in an apparent attempt to influence the nature of the next Labour-led coalition.

The result was an election which - unlike almost all elections under first-past-the-post - was not about voting a Government in or out.

Instead, it was a new phenomenon - an election in which people were free to vote for a bewildering variety of parties.

Surprisingly, almost everyone seems to have caught on to the new politics. The old have been as volatile as the young, and women almost as fickle as men.

The Herald-DigiPoll data on small sub-groups is subject to a big margin of error. But Labour lost an enormous amount of support among young people.

Its support among the under-forties fell from 55 per cent when the campaign opened to 36 per cent when it closed.

Among the middle-aged group (40-59), Labour started weaker and finished on 37 per cent.

Only among the over-sixties did its support hold, at between 46 and 50 per cent throughout the campaign.

Instead, about 10 per cent of the over-60 group deserted National during the campaign and went to Winston Peters' NZ First.

This pushed his support from 6 per cent of the 40-plus group at the start to 16 per cent of the 60-plus group and 10 per cent of those aged 40-59 by the end.

Labour continued to appeal much more strongly to women, as it has done at every election since 1990, reversing decades when women were generally more conservative than men.

Male support for Labour dropped from 44 per cent to 32 per cent in the last two weeks of the campaign, and female Labour support fell from 52 per cent to 45 per cent.

Men went slightly disproportionately to NZ First, the Greens and Act, and women fell for Peter Dunne.

In the final Herald-DigiPoll, Dunne's United Future won 6.2 per cent support from women and 4.6 per cent from men.

Dunne also appealed slightly more to the middle-aged (6.6 per cent) and elderly (5.7 per cent), compared with 4.3 per cent among the under-forties.

Higher-income groups abandoned Labour during the campaign and shifted to Peters and Act.

Among the richest fifth of the population, Labour ended up with 28.6 per cent support. National won 35.5 per cent, Act 14.5 per cent, NZ First 8.1 per cent and United Future 4.7 per cent.

Among the next-highest fifth, Labour and National won 27.7 per cent each, the Greens 11.7 per cent, Act 10.1 per cent, United Future 9.6 per cent and NZ First 7.4 per cent.

Labour support held up at around 50 per cent in the poorest two-fifths of the population, where Act and United Future did relatively badly.

NZ First and Green support was spread more evenly across all income groups.

The last Herald-DigiPoll suggests that United Future's support came roughly equally from National and Labour, both accounting for about one in every three United voters. Another one in three United voters was gathered from across the rest of the political spectrum.

About a third of NZ First voters voted National last time, but only about a fifth had voted Labour and a fifth were repeat NZ First voters.

Most Green voters voted either Green last time (38 per cent) or Labour (30 per cent).

There was, however, one partial exception to the general rule that volatility has infected every part of the electorate. Rural areas stayed much more stable than the cities.

Since the 1999 election, National has lost more than a third of its voting share in Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington and Christchurch.

But it kept about three-quarters of its 1999 voting share in the provincial North Island, and more than four-fifths of its previous share in the provincial South Island.

But the two provincial regions joined Auckland and Hamilton in swinging heavily to Winston Peters.

Act confirmed its previous showing as a city party, scoring most strongly in Auckland.

The Greens and United Future performed evenly in all regions.

Labour improved its 1999 showing in all general regions and held steady in the Maori seats.

Turnout in the Maori seats dropped more than anywhere else, from 70.6 per cent of the roll last time to 54.4 per cent on Saturday, although voters on the Maori rolls could for the first time cast ordinary votes at any polling place.

This drop may reflect the fact that the main Maori opposition to Labour in the last two elections, NZ First, did not stand candidates in any of the Maori seats this year, because it campaigned to abolish them.

Despite that, it won 15 per cent of the party vote in the seats, well ahead of the Greens (10.2 per cent), National (4.1 per cent), Mana Maori (3.7 per cent) and the Alliance/Mana Motuhake (2.5 per cent).

One of the surprises of the election, the new Outdoor Recreation Party, beat the Alliance to win 1.3 per cent of the national vote.

It peaked at 5.4 per cent in West Coast-Tasman.

Laila Harre's Alliance (1.2 per cent) and Jim Anderton's Progressive Coalition (1.8 per cent) between them kept fewer than half of the 7.7 per cent of voters who supported the Alliance last time.

The Herald-DigiPoll suggests that 35.1 per cent of last-time Alliance voters went to Labour this time, 16.2 per cent to Anderton, 13.5 per cent to the Greens, 10.8 per cent each to Harre and United Future and 8.1 per cent to NZ First.

Thanks to the dominantly male party lists of NZ First and United Future, the proportion of female MPs in the new Parliament has dropped drop for the first time in at least 20 years.

Unless special votes change the results, the 120 MPs will include 35 women, against 37 in the previous parliament.

But the heavily Maori NZ First list, plus new Labour list MP Dave Hereora and Green list MP Metiria Turei, have boosted the number of Maori in the House by three, from 16 to 19.

The proportion of Maori MPs (15.8 per cent) now roughly equals the proportion of Maori in the population (15 per cent).

Two new Asian MPs, Dr Ashraf Choudhary (Labour) and Kelly Chal (United Future), join National's Pansy Wong.

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