‘Watching your parents negotiate the terms of an open relationship’: New Zealand’s election results

After Saturday’s general election in New Zealand, there are still roughly half a million special votes to be counted — a huge number of them from Kiwis in Australia. The centre-right National and much-further-right ACT parties together have 61 seats in a 121-seat Parliament. Still, Saturday’s preliminary results mean they can’t immediately go ahead with their favoured option — a monogamous two-party coalition. 

Yesterday National Party leader and soon-to-be Prime Minister Chris Luxon told media waiting at Wellington Airport that his team has reached out to the New Zealand First Party, and is looking to progress talks before the special votes have been counted on November 3. 

Because special votes traditionally lean left, it is now highly likely the National Party will have to enter into a three-way (relationship) with both ACT and Winston Peters’ NZ First Party. 

Previously the National Party, and especially the minor ACT Party, had high hopes for a traditional two-party coalition. Which would have spared us from what feels like the political equivalent of watching your parents negotiate the terms of an open relationship. In the lounge. Every night for the next three weeks. 

While it could technically take that long to hammer out the terms of the coalition “relationship” because of the length of time counting the special votes, it may not — according to insiders with experience of working with Mr Peters. Speaking anonymously to Crikey, an ex-politician reckoned on Peters going to the nation’s capital and telling Luxon he wanted a deal sewn up by Thursday. 

By Monday’s close, there was reliable chatter that Peters had already been offered the speaker of the House role and promptly turned it down, saying to media, “Do I look like I’d be interested in the speaker’s job?”

For those unfamiliar with 78-year-old, five-decades-in-Parliament Peters, this is on a par with asking Tony Soprano if he would consider a job as a bank teller. After he’s already successfully robbed the bank.  

Any coalition between the three parties will, by dint of NZ First’s inclusion, disrupt some of the National’s and ACT’s hopes and dreams, Winston Peters having poured scorn on some of the financial policies they campaigned on just half a day after the election.  

“When we open the books very shortly, we will realise just how serious our crisis in economic terms is,” Peters said. 

Without explicitly naming names, he also suggested there were a lot of unaffordable promises that had been made that could soon be confetti.

Ex-CEO Luxon has said he wants negotiations to take place out of sight of the kids, I mean voters. “I need to be able to work with those individual parties and make sure that that is confidential and private and negotiated rather than trying to do it all through a blow-by-blow out in the public domain … We are not doing this by negotiation through the media.” 

Which, on the face of it, is all very admirable and prime ministerial, but also makes it look like he didn’t read the intel folder his staff prepared for him on his two new special friends.

With a long history of trading genuine insults, Peters and ACT Leader David Seymour clearly and viscerally dislike each other. Their only commonality has been deciding there were votes to be had in casual race-baiting. They both proved themselves to be master baiters. 

That aside, on Monday afternoon insiders predicted the possibility that various ACT and NZ First candidates are about to get far cosier than they anticipated, with several expecting significant roles like the minister of finance may be shared between two or more people in an effort to get a government formed quickly. 

While Luxon, who has only been a member of Parliament since 2020, has stated that he wants the next few weeks to play out in a seemly and private manner, he may want to consider how that will happen given he is now negotiating relationship terms with two minor party leaders who have every political journalist on speed dial and 43 years of political experience between them.