Will vote splitting result in PM splitting?
The overhang campaign is no last-minute rescue. The prize is the top job.
The right’s vote-splitting campaign has burst into full-page newspaper advertisements in the final week of the election. Don’t be fooled by the timing. This is no last-minute rescue. It has been the plan all along, and who is Prime Minister will be part of the negotiations.
Overhangs are nothing new. The Maori Party caused four. Peter Dunne’s United Future caused one in 2014 on 0.22 per cent. ACT came close in 2017, when David Seymour held Epsom on the party’s worst-ever result.
Between NZ First’s six electorates in 1996 and the 2023 election, the Maori Party was the only minor party to hold more than one. Then the Greens won three and ACT two.
That is about as good as it gets. National and Labour hold most other electorates. A large overhang needs voters to elect a major party’s candidate while giving their party vote to a minor party. National, polling between 24.8 and 29 per cent, could become the first major party to do it. Te Pati Maori’s rival overhang is capped at seven.
For decades, voters have been told the party vote is what matters. Now an advertisement written by Don Brash, signed off by ACT and NZ First, tells them not to give it to National.
I have heard this before. Decades ago, I was part of several conversations with the very people now pushing this message. I warned in Stuff in 2013 that politicians abuse MMP’s flaws, and set out this arithmetic in April.
Leaked correspondence in Nicky Hager’s Dirty Politics showed Simon Lusk and Cameron Slater positioning hard-right candidates in safe National seats. Lusk called it “a long game”. Hager says he wanted Brash to replace Rodney Hide at ACT in 2011. Slater now features on Reality Check Radio’s campaign page.
An overhang would finish the job. National’s list would empty. Out would go list-only Nicola Willis, Chris Bishop if he loses Hutt South, and others outside the hard right. The safe-seat MPs would remain.
John Key, whose party once told Epsom to back ACT, is now urging two ticks to save Paul Goldsmith’s political career. Seymour, top of ACT’s list, could lose Epsom and stay in Parliament. That suits him. A list MP has more time to expand his agenda, then retire without a by-election before voters send him a message in 2029.
Willis, Bishop and Goldsmith all sat on National’s 2023 negotiating team. If they are gone, who negotiates the next deal?
Seymour says it is “very possible” he will ask to be Finance Minister, though he then said people were getting ahead of themselves. I reckon he will negotiate for much more. A weakened National could end up negotiating who is Prime Minister.
I have said before that this election’s leaders of National, ACT and NZ First won’t be the leaders at the next. Christopher Luxon’s best preferred prime minister result of the campaign is 24 per cent. I now wonder whether Seymour and Winston Peters might want to be Prime Minister for a year each.
The group dynamic makes it conceivable. In 2023, when NZ First suggested something, ACT wanted it too. Hence the split deputy prime ministership. And the Governor-General appoints whoever the government formation process identifies, not automatically the leader of the largest party.
If National pushes back on sharing the job, ACT and NZ First might insist on another option: they choose the Prime Minister.
Enter Mark Mitchell. It might not appear to originate inside National, but plenty of strings are being pulled from outside. Hager concluded that Mitchell would probably not have won the safe seat of Rodney without Lusk and Slater, who had an apprentice in Jordan Williams. Mitchell is also already being tipped as Luxon’s successor and there is no lack of campaign cash from outside his party that would create the perfect environment for his ascendancy.
Voters split their ticks. The parties split the spoils. Don’t be surprised if the top job is among them.
