It was the 'overhang' wot done it

By Chris Trotter*

What a mess! The 2026 General Election has delivered one of the most equivocal judgements in New Zealand’s political history.

Ask yourself: When was the last time the largest party in an incumbent coalition government, in spite of shedding more than 20 percent of the support it had attracted just three years earlier, and losing three senior cabinet ministers, was still, on the basis of the provisional count, in a position to go on governing?

In 2023, National, Act, and NZ First together accounted for 52.78 percent of the Party Vote. In 2026, the combined Party Vote of the three coalition partners amounts to just 49.9 percent. Very nearly a majority. But “very nearly a majority” never used to be enough.

To be sure, National’s 2026 collapse is not as impressive as Labour’s debacle of 2023. From an astonishing 50.01 percent of the Party Vote in 2020, Labour’s support in 2023 plummeted to a risible 26.91 percent.

The point being, that this calamitous loss of public sympathy resulted in Labour being turfed out of office. As was only right and proper. Under MMP, the combined Party Vote of any group of political parties seeking to form a coalition government is supposed to add up to more than 50 percent – not less.

So why aren’t National and its allies, Act and NZ First, licking their electoral wounds in some dark corner of the political stage? Why aren’t Labour, the Greens, Te Pāti Māori and Opportunity fronting-up to the media gaggle as the winning 2026 electoral combo?

It was the “overhang” wot done it.

Very few New Zealanders paying the slightest attention to the political contest of the past few weeks will be unaware of the machinations of both the Left and the Right to engineer a situation in which the core MMP principle of proportionality was subverted to the advantage of their respective electoral “blocs”.

The question we should really be asking ourselves is: Why did the “overhang strategy” work?

Historically, a political party undergoing a 20 percent collapse in its Party Vote should be registering a corresponding falling away of support at the electorate level. In the simplest terms: If voter support for the Right is faltering, then the Left should be experiencing an equal and opposite electoral surge.

But that is not what the National Party’s activists and pollsters encountered. They discovered that National’s grip on all but a handful of the 44 electorate seats it had won in 2023 remained remarkably firm. So firm that it is probable that even if Te Pāti Māori’s deliberate vote-splitting strategy had not prompted National’s friends and allies to launch their own in self-defence, the size of the National “overhang” may have been equally impressive.

Vice-Admiral David Beatty, seeing yet another British battlecruiser explode during the Battle of Jutland on 31 May 1916 is said to have remarked with considerable exasperation: “There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today.”

Labour’s chief electoral strategists might be forgiven for making a similar observation. Not only about the failure to fire of Labour’s electorate candidates in 2026, but in earlier elections.

Notwithstanding the extraordinary “red wave” that swept over New Zealand in the “Covid Election” of 2020, Labour’s competitiveness at the electorate level has been in steady decline for more than a decade.

There seems to be something wrong with Labour’s bloody candidates these days.

The problem began more than half-a-century ago when an influx of younger, university-educated men and women started raising the hackles of Labour’s working-class traditionalists.

The causes these newcomers carried into the party with them: abortion, homosexual law reform, a more sociological reading of law and order, and a deep opposition to Apartheid South Africa and its sporting representatives; disconcerted the party faithful, many of whom were conservative Christians – and fanatical rugby supporters!

A significant number of these traditionalists defected from what they now characterised as a new and unacceptably, “liberal” Labour Party. Many of them joined “Rob’s Mob” – the voluble public cheer-squad of National’s populist leader Robert Muldoon.

Ironically, “Muldoonism” and all its right-wing works drew Labour’s liberals and traditionalists into an uneasy alliance. Within the party organisation, however, those Labour MPs who opposed the signature causes of social liberalism – abortion in particular – were quietly targeted for “retirement.”

Even more ironically, it was Jim Anderton (later to become a powerful defender of traditional Labour values) who, as Labour’s President from 1979 to 1984, oversaw the selection of “electable” professional candidates for winnable Labour seats. Geoffrey Palmer, Helen Clark, Clive Matthewson, Michael Cullen, Peter Dunne, and many others became Members of Parliament. The socio-political profile of Labour was altered irrevocably.

“Rogernomics” could not have proceeded without the “professionalisation” of the Labour caucus. When the continuation and intensification of Roger Douglas’s free-market revolution eventually split the party in 1989, the organisational husk that remained was taken over by the social-liberal careerists who had opted to remain.

The professionals and managers who now controlled the party understood the immense power of Labour’s “brand”. Red printers’ ink and images of Mickey Savage kept the memory of the historical Labour Party alive even as the economic and social policies of the MPs who controlled it veered away sharply from the “democratic socialism” still referenced in the party’s constitution.

But if democratic socialism has been reduced to a mere rhetorical flourish by Labour’s party activists and parliamentarians, their impulse to reform society remains strong.

The problem Labour struggles with is that what the professional-managerial class perceives as social ills in need of aggressive state intervention, are perceived by a majority of their fellow citizens as the normal and ultimately surmountable challenges of everyday life.

The “isms” and “phobias” that Labour’s activists are so committed to eradicating are regarded by most voters as being if not admirable then tolerable. They tend to equate legislative programmes designed to criminalise “harmful” thoughts and words as unacceptably authoritarian. Attempts to weaponise biology and history are rejected by most New Zealanders as straightforwardly dangerous.

Labour’s strategists know this. They understand that practical electoral politics requires a laser-like focus on cost-of-living “bread and butter” issues. Accordingly, all the ideological merchandise is kept out the back of Labour’s retail politics store. It can’t be disowned, the activists would never stand for that, but they don’t put it in the shop’s front window.

These conflicting impulses have transformed Labour into a weirdly schizoid political entity. It’s committed to all manner of radical reforms it prefers not to talk about, but will not commit to the radical policies the public talks about all the time.

With Labour it is very much a case of never being given what you want, and never being entirely sure or comfortable about what Labour wants to give you.

A party vote for Labour generally represents the triumph of hope over experience. A wild bet that maybe this time the rhetoric will be matched by effective action.

When faced with a flesh-and-blood person however, a candidate who will, if pressed, reveal just a little of what the party intends to put in the front window the moment it is elected, is it really so surprising that a significant number of potentially winnable voters opt to play it safe by voting for National, Act, or NZ First candidates?

Only a tiny handful of Labour MPs strike the average voter as someone they might enjoy having a beer with. One such MP was the former President of the Police Association, Greg O’Connor.

A West Coaster with Irish Catholic roots, O’Connor defeated Nicola Willis to become Labour’s MP for Ohariu. (If she had beaten him, she’d still be Finance Minister).

Of course O’Connor wouldn’t have taken the new seat of Wellington North. Too old, too white, too male, too straight. His face simply doesn’t fit the template of an acceptable left-wing inner-city candidate in 2026.

His values are the values of the ordinary Kiwi. His likes and dislikes match theirs pretty closely. He’s seen the dark side of humanity up close and knows that perfectibility is a pipe dream. He understands that anguish and evil cannot be legislated out of existence.

If Labour was willing to select more electorate candidates like Greg O’Connor for seats that candidates like Greg O’Connor could win then, who knows, National might not now be sitting pretty on 42 electorate seats, and the Left Bloc might be sitting pretty on the Treasury Benches.

*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.