The sixth Labour government has been scourged. In 2020 Jacinda Ardern led her party to an historic victory, and three years later Labour has suffered a loss of biblical proportions: the worst result of an incumbent government since the formation of the modern major parties in the 1930s. It has been beaten, humiliated, and cast from power - but the nation has not rewarded National, which has barely exceeded its average party vote over the MMP era.
Instead, New Zealand has elected a highly fragmented Parliament. On current results, the Green Party has 14 seats. Three of these are electorates: Wellington Central, Rongotai and Auckland Central - the seat held by Chlöe Swarbrick, who will almost certainly be a co-leader of her party by 2026. Act holds 11 seats: its best result ever. David Seymour retained Epsom and, last night, his deputy, Brooke van Velden, captured Tamaki, traditionally one of the safest National seats in the country. New Zealand First holds eight seats and Te Pāti Māori four, winning a deeply symbolic victory in Hauraki-Waikato against Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta, the longest serving female MP in Parliament, defeated by Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, who will be our youngest MP in 170 years.
The results in the Māori seats are likely to cause an overhang in Parliament so the composition of the incoming government is still unclear. It might not be officially resolved until late November. Te Pāti Māori holds electorate seats disproportionate to its share of the party vote, creating an overhang. There will be a larger number of MPs in the next Parliament - probably 122 in total, after the upcoming by-election in Port Waikato triggered by the death of Act’s candidate Neil Christensen mid-campaign.
If National leader Christopher Luxon wants to form a government he’ll need a majority of 62. On last night’s results, National and Act have 61, and National will almost certainly win the Port Waikato contest on November 25.
But more than half a million special votes remain uncounted. Some of these are overseas ballots but most are people who enrolled on election day or who voted outside their electorate. In past elections, all three of these groups skewed left. When the official result is delivered on November 3 it will probably reallocate at least one additional vote to the left-wing parties at a cost to National, Act or New Zealand First. In 2020 and again in 2017, the official results saw two MPs redistributed to the left.
In early counting last night, National’s victory seemed greater than it was: a reflection of a strong early campaign that fell to pieces in its final stages. When it appeared that National and Act could form a majority without him, NZ First’s Winston Peters appeared on stage at the Duke of Marlborough in Russell and humbly offered to help them solve the nation’s challenges. This morning, National is still signalling its intention to enter coalition with Act - but if their current majority slips through their fingers, Peters’ tone will become more defiant. It will probably be in National’s interests to sign a co-operation agreement with NZ First, even if that party is not needed. Former prime minister John Key repeatedly demonstrated the value of having multiple coalition partners he could play off against each other without being reliant on any one of them. But it will take only a slight shift in the numbers for Christopher Luxon to find he needs both parties to govern. And that will be a fraught and difficult arrangement.
When Chris Hipkins conceded defeat last night, he delivered the epitaph for his tenure as Prime Minister: “It has not been easy.” When he succeeded Jacinda Ardern at the beginning of the year, inflation was high. Auckland suffered heavy flooding, Hawke’s Bay was devastated by a cyclone. Hipkins’ Cabinet required constant reshuffling as three of his ministers - Stuart Nash, Michael Wood and Kiri Allen - destroyed their careers with self-inflicted scandals. Hipkins himself contracted Covid during the election campaign.
But Hipkins was indirectly responsible for much of his party’s decline. He was the Covid-19 Response Minister, and the early phase was a triumph that voters rewarded in 2020. But 2021 saw one of the slowest vaccine rollouts in the OECD after the government failed to negotiate purchase agreements with pharmaceutical companies. The lack of vaccine coverage led to the sustained Auckland lockdown of late 2021, a policy failure that the nation’s largest city has punished them for by delivering a number of Labour’s safest seats to National. Mt Roskill and New Lynn have fallen, Mt Albert and Te Atatū look set to fall. Hipkins was also Minister of Health, Education, Police and the Public Service: all areas in which his government’s legacy is questionable at best. Commentators on the Left have made much of his captain’s call to rule out a tax switch earlier this year. And after promising to focus on the cost of living, Labour delivered piecemeal handouts - subscription subsidies, the GST exemption - which were more than cancelled out by its increases in fuel taxes. In a campaign in which the nation demanded change, Hipkins promised stasis.
In her election night concession speech in 2008, outgoing prime minister Helen Clark warned of a “right-wing bonfire” that would destroy her government’s accomplishments. But most of Clark’s legacy endured. Labour was still popular, winning 34% of the party vote that year. Public support for its accomplishments - KiwiSaver, Working for Families, interest free student loans, KiwiRail, the Cullen fund - was too strong for National to set it all alight. And when National lost power nine years later, it too was still well-liked, winning significantly more seats than Labour, but unable to forge a coalition with Winston Peters.
Most of the Key-English era policies were left untouched. But much of the work of the Ardern-Hipkins administration will be consigned to the flames. Hipkins held his own bonfire earlier this year, incinerating a clutch of unpopular policies. But much of National’s campaign this year was based around the destruction of the legacy of the sixth Labour government: water services reform, the Maori Health Authority, fair pay agreements, welfare indexation, the medium-density housing reforms, Auckland light rail, the regional fuel tax and reform of the Resource Management Act.
National will bring back the three strikes law and re-index benefits to wage inflation. The public service - the centralised administrative state that Labour has lavished with unprecedented power and money - will be burned back. The most significant surviving policy achievement from 2017-23 will be the zero carbon framework – delivered not by Labour, but by Greens co-leader James Shaw.
Both major parties skirted away from discussing the Treaty of Waitangi during the campaign. It has become too controversial, too divisive for the safe, unsubstantive median-voter strategies they both prefer. But the treaty casts a vast shadow. For 90 years, National and Labour have walked a narrow path together, slowly defining the nation’s founding document into policy and law. In the past three years, they’ve lost control of the issue – Act, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori all advocate for radical new interpretations of the treaty. Act has indicated that a referendum on co-governance will be a priority for it. New Zealand First is also interested in redrawing the boundaries of treaty interpretation.
Our Parliament is fractured, and Christopher Luxon is one of the least experienced prime ministers the nation has seen. Both his potential coalition partners want to lead him into the treacherous domains of race relations and constitutional reform. He’s faced with a cost of living crisis that he’s promised to solve but which his current policies will probably make worse, and he’s promised tax cuts that he cannot afford. He is leading us into a dark and difficult time in our history - with only the firelight of the previous government’s failures to guide him.
