'I just wanted to get to know her' - Luxon says he really enjoyed meeting with Opportunity's Qiulae Wong

National leader Christopher Luxon and Opportunity Party leader Qiulae Wong met for an hour in Luxon's office on Monday night to get to know each other and find areas of collaboration. 

It was a far cry from Luxon's stance up until the election where he had ruled out working with Opportunity. 

Talking to media on Tuesday, Luxon said they "had a very positive, very constructive conversation, and also was a great opportunity... to get to know her and to start to build a relationship together as well". 

"I didn't know her that well, and she didn't know me that well, and I just wanted to get to know her," Luxon said.

"We just spent time... getting to know each other and actually talking about motivations for being together in in Parliament and why we're in politics. It was a very positive, very constructive, very good conversation, and I really enjoyed it."

Both chief of staffs (National's Cameron Burrows and Opportunity's Iain Lees-Galloway) were also in attendance. 

If he could see himself working with Wong, Luxon said, "there are areas where there will be areas of collaboration." 

"A lot of their thinking on KiwiSaver is aligned with the National Party thinking on KiwiSaver. There are areas like AI where we want to work with many political parties around that, certainly infrastructure. 

"There's a number of areas of collaboration. There's areas where we obviously have disagreement on tax and other things, but we didn't get too detailed."

Opportunity came in with 5.96% of the vote in the preliminary election count over the weekend, with the special votes set to lay out the final result on November 27. Preliminary votes give the right bloc enough seats without Opportunity to form a government, but the result is up in the air until special votes - which make up about 14% of the vote - are counted.

Wong said on Monday she was not surprised Luxon wanted to talk to her. 

Opportunity Party's incoming caucus. Image source: Mandy Te

Luxon said it was important to "foreshadow that I genuinely do want to have relationships with political leaders across the parliament."

"There's a lot of strategic policy areas for New Zealand going forward that actually are not deeply ideological or should be party-founded type conversations."

He also spoke to NZ First leader Winston Peters and ACT leader David Seymour to congratulate them on the result. 

"Obviously, we're in a position where we have 42 seats, and obviously a pathway to form a government," he noted. "But as I've said over the last few days, we need to wait and to get those special votes counted, it's very important that we respect every single vote."

Christopher Luxon - Anna Whyte

The numbers

Projected blocs (66 needed) for a 131 seat Parliament (11 seat overhang)
The right bloc seats: National 42 + ACT 13 + NZ First 12 = 67

The left bloc (with Opportunity and the Greens as Labour's preferred partners): Labour 36 + Greens 16 + Opportunity 7 + TPM 5 = 64

The parties

National Party  29.21%    42  electorate seats, 0 list seats (42 total)
Labour Party  29.36%    21 electorate seats, 15  list seats  (36 total)
Green Party  13.30%    2 electorate seats,    14  list seats   (16 total)
ACT New Zealand 10.92%    1 electorate seat,  12  list seats  (13 total)
New Zealand First Party 9.78%     12 list seats  (12 total)
Opportunity Party 5.96%    -    6  list seats (6 total)
Te Pāti Māori  0.57%    5 electorate seats (5 total)

The Electoral Commission estimates the number of special votes is approximately 399,365 - approximately 14% of total votes.

The overhang

Parliament has 120 seats, but this election has delivered a staggering 11 extra overhang seats. The overhang is when additional seats are added to Parliament's 120 to accommodate extra MPs due to the difference between electorate and party vote results.

Those seats come from Te Pāti Māori which only received 0.57% of the vote, but were successful in winning five Māori electorate seats. They bring in one new MP, Aperahama Edwards who won Te Tai Tokerau. 

The other overhang seats come from National, which only pulled in 29% of the party vote but won 42 electorates. 

That meant National brought in no list MPs, so the likes of Nicola Willis, Paul Goldsmith and Gerry Brownlee will not be returning to Parliament. Chris Bishop is also behind by almost 900 votes in Hutt South, meaning he would also not be returning.