Analysis: The final votes are in, and National and ACT need New Zealand First to form the next government. John Campbell asks, what happens now? And where to for the Labour Party?
National + ACT = Not Enough.
In numerical terms, that’s 48 seats plus 11 seats to make a total of 59.
With a 123 seat Parliament for the next three years, that leaves the two, blue-suited buddies of the right unable to form a Government… without, and he’d surely want a drum roll, Winston Peters.
What an extraordinary result.
Having said "coalition of chaos" so many times his tongue got repetitive strain injury, Christopher Luxon now finds himself in charge of one.
Remember, David Seymour is the man that Winston Peters described as having "discovered his Māori-ness the same way Columbus discovered America, purely by accident".
Seymour replied by accusing Peters of "identity politics".
That’s like Benson and Hedges accusing Rothmans of being a cigarette.
Anyway, they now have to bury the hatchet. And not in each other.
What happens next?
For Christopher Luxon, it may well be getting in a trailer load of Pepsi Max.
I’ve written about the National component of the incoming Government and the almost chasmic disparity between its high-volume rhetorical zeal, its "new direction" pulpit thumping, its sloganeering, and an actual policy platform that seemed to contain so very little that might be transformative for people who aren’t property owners, who aren’t landlords, and who find themselves buried so deep beneath the “squeezed middle” that they appear to have disappeared from view.
Had National done better, a conservative, shiny-suited orthodoxy would have awaited us. Government by Koru Lounge.
But who knows what lies ahead now?
Luxon has kept his powder dry in the weeks since the election. It’s been a judicious silence. He hasn’t committed himself to anything.
So, he’s started calmly. But then, so did the Titanic.
And what appears to give Winston Peters the kind of negotiating power he adores is Luxon’s previous declaration that Te Pāti Māori, who now have six seats, are out.
"I can't see a way in which we would be working with the Māori Party,” he told RNZ in May. "You know, our values are just not aligned, we believe in very different things, they believe in a separate Parliament, they believe in the co-governance of public services and they have a much more separatist agenda, and that is just something that we don't, we're not aligned with."
Is that more or less "not aligned with" than the jumble-sale policy suite of New Zealand First?
Coalition discussions are going well, Winston Peters told 1News yesterday. But he didn’t know then what we all know now – that the final numbers would so significantly strengthen his position. It’s not his first rodeo, as he kept telling us. And he just got a better horse.
And Labour? Labour? Where to now for them?
Is there in anyone in that denuded party who thinks that steady-as-she-goes will do it? Who thinks there is a continuance position in losing Mt Roskill to National, almost losing Mt Albert to National, losing six of the seven Māori electorates to Te Pāti Māori, losing Auckland Central, Wellington Central, Rongotai and a calorific slice of party votes to the Greens, and failing to mobilise significantly large numbers of the young, low-income voters that Labour used to share a trust-relationship with?
This may not be an existential crisis for Labour. They’ve lost before. They’ve lost by more. But National are so pro-forma, so ordinary, and the Nats only picked up 38.06% of the vote (significantly lower than their election winning share in 2008, 2011 and 2014).
In short, Labour must pay genuine attention to the messages they’ve received. Seriously. Their party vote almost halving. Nine percent behind a not overwhelmingly successful National. Bleeding support to the Greens and Te Pāti Māori. Cursed by electorate campaigns that sometimes looked like their candidates were phoning it in, on phones that had run out of credit.
Naval gazing will not do it now. Besides, navel gazing is for people with navels. Labour seem disembodied.
As for the Greens, ACT and Te Pāti Māori. Well, they all have more MPs then ever before in their history.
I wrote about this in July. At that stage, the two big parties had 68% of the decided vote. They ended up with 65%.
"The centre cannot hold", I said, quoting WB Yeats, then adding some non-poetry of my own: "maybe, with Labour and National, the centre isn’t holding because it’s offering so little to hold to".
And so here we sit.
Luxon, Seymour and Peters. The kind of sandwich you wouldn’t take to a picnic.
Luxon says he’s been working on "chemistry" in advance of formal negotiations. He’ll need it.
He backs himself, that former CEO.
It will be a triumph if he can make this meaningfully and reliably work.
And Winston Peters? In September, I looked back over his three decades of surviving like a cockroach. The "Whaddaya got?" man. Back in negotiations again.
What does he want?
What does David Seymour want?
And how much is Luxon prepared to give them?
"We are working constructively with both parties. We are going to come together and form a strong stable government," Luxon said, this afternoon.
"Stable". There’s a word worth remembering. That’s where horses live, isn’t it?
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