Those planning to rort MMP should bear in mind that two can play at that game

By Chris Trotter*

There's a startling anomaly in New Zealand’s record of post-war general elections. In the 40 years between 1945 and 1985 the percentage of registered voters turning out to cast their ballots never dropped below 82.5 percent – except for 1978. In 1978 the official turnout is recorded as 69.2 percent. 

What happened in 1978? Well, according to the boffins at the Electoral Commission: “Due to major problems with the enrolment process, commentators generally consider that the 1978 election had a significantly higher turnout than official figures indicate.” Which is a rather oblique explanation, given that the body responsible for those official figures is … The Electoral Commission. 

There’s another oddity about the 1978 General Election. It marked one of the very rare occasions since the Second World War when the party that won the most votes did not win the most seats. In 1978 Labour won 691,076 votes (40.4 percent) compared to National’s 680,991 (39.8 percent). Thanks to New Zealand’s First-Past-the-Post electoral system, however, National ended up with 55 percent of the seats. 

Viewed through the conspiratorial lenses of the Twenty-First Century, the 1978 General Election looks bloody suspicious. The government of the day, presided over by the pugnacious Rob Muldoon, manages to completely stuff-up the processes of electoral enrolment, oversees one of the most aggressive redistricting exercises in New Zealand’s political history, and then, somehow, retains power by winning 55 percent of the seats with 39 percent of the popular vote. 

Twenty-first Century conspiracists would further draw attention to the unusual amount of covert “assistance” afforded to the National Party Opposition by agencies of the United States government in the run-up to the 1975 General Election. The most notable of these helpful gestures was the roping-in of the Hanna Barbera animation studios to produce the political “cartoons” that were to play such a vital role in National’s election campaign – not the least of which was the infamous “Dancing Cossacks” attack ad’. 

But if 1978 wasn’t just another example of the New Zealand bureaucracy’s capacity to cock things up, then what was the alleged conspiracy aiming to achieve? 

Ask a left-wing conspiracist and they will likely tell you that it was about the Right making sure that the all the radical social-democratic policies buried since 1973 stayed buried. An extended period of reliable right-wing rule was required if the left-wing parties were to be made safe enough to re-elect. They would also remind you that the events of 1978 unfolded in the context of the Cold War. Politicians played for keeps back then. 

That said, an anomaly on the scale of 1978 cannot help but create powerful eddies in the historical flow. Many New Zealand political scientists trace the movement toward proportional representation back to the manifest unfairness of the 1978 result. That movement was only strengthened three years later when, once again, Labour won more votes than National but still managed to “lose” the 1981 General Election. 

Nearly half-a-century on from the peculiar election of 1978 New Zealand shows every sign of facing another. Sceptics requiring proof that any electoral system can be rigged and rorted should be eagerly anticipating the General Election of 2026 which is showing alarming signs of providing it. 

The Mixed Member Proportional electoral system, as adapted to New Zealand, has always contained within it the potential for abuse. Most particularly the phenomenon of the MMP “overhang” which allows a political party to keep any electorate seats won – even if that leaves it holding more parliamentary seats in total than its share of the Party Vote would warrant. 

Co-ordinated “vote splitting” could potentially produce a significantly enlarged House of Representatives. Were this to happen, then the ideological bloc winning a majority of the Party Vote might well find itself unable to form a government. It would be 1978 and 1981 all over again – the sort of result that MMP was supposed to make impossible. 

Politicians and party activists had spotted this potential for rorting the MMP system almost immediately. Reassuringly, the leaders of all viable electoral options ruled out the “Overhang Strategy” as an outrageous manipulation of the rules. A manipulation, moreover, for which any party foolish enough to attempt it was certain to suffer the most extreme electoral retribution. Since 1996 the strategy has become little more than the pub fantasy of political tragics. 

How, then, should we interpret the very public adoption of the Overhang Strategy by Te Pāti Māori? Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer are asking voters on the Māori Roll to give them only their Candidate Vote, and encouraging all those Māori determined to unseat the National-Act-NZ First coalition government to give their Party Vote to TPM’s ideological allies in Labour and the Greens. Come December the Overhang thus created could see the Left Bloc seated on the Treasury Benches – in spite of receiving a minority of the votes cast. 

By embracing the Overhang Strategy Te Pāti Māori is acknowledging two things: the profoundly cynical mindset in which it engages with and benefits from New Zealand’s representative democracy; and its willingness to risk provoking a ruthless Pakeha backlash strong enough to imperil not only the entire MMP electoral system, but also the 160 year-old institution of guaranteed indigenous representation in New Zealand’s parliament – the Māori Seats themselves. 

What on earth possessed the Māori Queen’s first minister, Tukoroirangi Morgan, to wink at such a perilous policy is anybody’s guess. 

Within 48 hours of Te Pāti Māori announcing its 2026 election strategy, Pakeha politicos were demonstrating in the clearest possible terms that two could play at that game. 

Don Brash, wearing his Hobson’s Pledge colours, was first out of the traps. Platform host and NZ First candidate Michael Laws was next, followed by New Zealand Initiative CEO Oliver Hartwich who, while deprecating Te Pāti Māori’s decision, had also thought to crunch the numbers.

In a post on the New Zealand Initiative website Hartwich declares:

 “The problem is not just the overhang that Te Pāti Māori’s move will create. It will also encourage other voters to retaliate. And indeed, if centre-right voters did that, the distortion would be even bigger. On current polling, National will win more electorates than its party vote covers. Effectively, this would leave close to 900,000 National party votes with no effect whatsoever on the result. In our new research note, we model what happens under such a scenario. If one National party vote in nine moved to a coalition partner, the Government would gain a parliamentary majority even if the opposition wins more votes in total. Such an outcome would be deeply ironic. New Zealand adopted MMP after first-past-the-post elections in which the party with the most votes still lost the election. That was not supposed to happen anymore.” 

In the United States the world observes with growing disgust what happens to a great democracy when political leaders no longer regard following the rules of the game as a moral, or even as a strategic, obligation: devoting themselves instead to devising new and better ways of gaming the system to their own and their party’s advantage. Such cynicism corrodes democracy with terrifying speed. 

If wiser heads do not prevail here in New Zealand, then in future years political scientists will no longer have cause to ponder the whys and wherefores of the anomalous 1978 General Election. Not while the corrupted election of 2026, and all that followed in its wake, continues to absorb the attention of every New Zealander who used to believe that such things could not happen here.

*Chris Trotter has been writing and commenting professionally about New Zealand politics for more than 30 years. He writes a weekly column for interest.co.nz. His work may also be found at http//:bowalleyroad.blogspot.com.