post election miasma

08 Nov, 2026

What to make of last night's Aotearoa New Zealand election results?

It's early days yet.

Those were preliminary results. Special votes still need to be counted, and it'll be the three weeks until we have final results. Then there will be the fun and games¹ of coalition negotiations. Then presumably we'll have a government².

I'm still trying to process what happened last night. There's some good, some bad, some that could still go either way. Here are some thoughts based purely on last night's preliminary results.

On the good side:

1. Several senior National Party MPs are now out of parliament, including Chris Bishop and Nicola Willis.

2. The Hutt Valley has flipped red³.

3. The Green Party won their highest ever share of the vote, which includes big gains in the Māori vote. Worth noting: Te Pāti Māori always focuses on winning electorate seats, so the Greens gaining Māori votes does not take away from TPM, but it does send a clear message to Labour to lift their game.

On the fence, as in, could go either way:

The Opportunity Party has entered parliament. It's very hard to get a read on Opportunity. Some see them as naturally tending left, because they come across as a party of nerds who want to work with the evidence. They explicitly brand themselves as not ideologues. But that also means they are open to working with anybody, so could swing right if the right presented the right deal for them. And then there are questions about their backers - apparently the same people who fund ACT are Opportunity's big financial backers. That has a lot of people seeing them as a kind of Trojan Horse presenting a nice, nerdy, evidence-based facade, but ready to prop up a right wing government as soon as their paymaster tells them to. Or something like that. I guess we're about to find out what they're really like.

The bad:

1. Somehow, even after Michael Lhaws⁴, New Zealand First managed to increase its share of the vote. Just a nice wee reminder that a large chunk of Aotearoa's population are perfectly comfortable with open, loud-mouthed bigotry.

2. Somehow, despite any evidence that their ideas work, or any evidence of intellectual depth, or any evidence of basic morality, or any ideological consistency, or the plenty of evidence that they're just an Atlas Network front, ACT increased its share of the vote. Epsom still voted for David Seymour even when, for the first time ever⁵, National was actually contesting that electorate.

3. With the numbers as they stand, National/ACT/NZ First should be able to form a coalition government, but this time, with ACT and NZ First coming in with a larger share of the vote, and therefore more power. With Christopher Luxon's history of doing a great impression of a jellyfish any time a leader with backbone has been needed in his first three years as Prime Minister, there is very good reason to believe that should these three continue in coalition government together, things are only going to get a lot worse.

4. One of the talking heads on RNZ's live coverage last night, I think it was Chris Finlayson, pointed out that the liberal wing of the National Party has now gone. Out of parliament. See above about things only getting a lot worse.

5. Overall, the suggestion is that at this point in Aotearoa's history, roughly half the voting age population (i.e. those 18 years and older, citizens and permanent residents) is quite happy to continue with corruption, incompetence, and petty, narrow-minded, mean, entirely deliberate cruelty. And a large chunk of them is quite content with even more extreme bigotry.

Is there any hope?

1. Well, it's a slim one, but there is hope in the special votes. Historically, special votes have tended left. Of course, Opportunity is in the mix this year, and we don't know how their presence will effect things. There is anecdotal evidence to suggest the special votes will give Opportunity a boost. There are also a couple of marginal seats currently held by National on very slim margins that special votes could swing back to Labour - for example, Wairarapa, which bounced between Labour's Kieran McAnulty and the National candidate all night before finally settling blue. Hamilton East is another. Of course, there is no law stating that special votes must favour the left, and Mt Roskill is currently held by a very slim margin by a Labour candidate, but could easily turn blue if the special votes there buck the historical trend.

2. There's no law stating that the current coalition has to continue. There's no reason to believe this given his performance over the last three years, but just imagine that Luxon grew a backbone and refused to bow to ACT and NZ First's more extreme demands, and instead sought support from more sensible, mature adults, like Opportunity, the Greens, even Labour?

Crazy idea:

I'm not, by any means, the first to suggest this. This is an idea that has been floated at previous elections. But why not? Why not a grand purple coalition, Labour and National together? Consign the radicals, extremists, and cookers in ACT and NZ First to the cross-benches, let Greens, Opportunity, and Te Pāti Māori form His Majesty's loyal, competent, mature opposition, and Labour and National figure out how to work together for once? Y'know, Labour taking on the role of National's erstwhile liberal wing. I think that would work.

And how do I feel about all of this?

About my crazy idea for a grand purple coalition? Not my idea, it's been floating around in the ether for years now, but yes, that's brilliant, and it really could work.

No, about the election results as they stand? Let's face it, even if all the special votes were divvied up between Labour, Te Pāti Māori, Greens, and Opportunity, it's still a very, very worrying result. That's still damn near half the country thinking we need more of the chaos, incompetence, destruction, cruelty, and corruption of the last three years with an added helping of vile bigotry.

So how am I feeling? I don't know. There's a lot of despair in there. I'm desperately trying to cling to hope, because I have a teenager who still has to finish high school, so I need to have hope. There's anger, but it seems to be mostly dormant right now. I'm sure the anger will surface in due course. And fear. Fear for the future, fear for my family's future⁶ in this country, fear for this country.

It's a scary time.

There are more examples of Lhaws' history of obnoxious, loud bigotry in the article.