News Briefing Top 10 for 10 November 2026
1. Grant McLachlan: Would another election be such a bad idea?
Labour leads National on the party vote, 710,330 to 706,680, yet trails it 42 seats to 36. Grant McLachlan notes that National last won most seats while losing the popular vote in 1981, and that injustice helped deliver MMP. Strip out both overhangs and the right holds 60 of 120 seats. If coalition talks fail, he makes the case for going back to the voters. A fresh campaign would start with voters knowing how the overhang worked and what Act and NZ First want from a weakened National, and with the Greens knowing where not to stand. Opportunity, he argues, has more to lose by propping up a three-party government whose partners would blame it for everything. More of the roughly 343,000 people who weren’t on the roll would enrol, and the donors and third-party promoters (who can spend $424,000 without reporting a single donor) wouldn’t get the same runway. On his timetable, a second election could be held in late February, and he reckons the right would lose.
2. David Cohen (Herald): National can only hope for a second-term Government where it’s barely the main ingredient (paywalled)
No sitting government this side of Tehran, David Cohen writes in the Herald, “has ever lost as many senior ministers in one hit”. He still thinks a second Luxon term is likely, probably with Qiulae Wong in a confidence-and-supply arrangement, but Luxon may keep the prime ministership and lose much of his power to decide what a National government does. The ministers who shaped the first term are gone, Act and NZ First both exceeded expectations, and National, as Cohen puts it, supplied the main ingredients last time but has now lost some of its flavour. The result could even be more left-leaning in some respects than the last Labour government. One former senior National minister described the campaign to Cohen as woeful, and the question of how long Luxon wants to stay on the slippery pole has resurfaced. No Labour leader has stayed on to contest a third election.
3. Simon Wilson: What does Qiulae really want?
Qiulae Wong will go with the vibe, Simon Wilson thinks. He can see her being powerfully tempted by the chance to get a National-led government to take climate policy, research funding and the Treaty more seriously, reviving something like late-stage Bolgerism and Bill English’s data-driven social policy. The harder question is who she would have to work with every day, and it’s hard to picture her enjoying a room with Luxon, Simeon Brown, Seymour or Peters. On his Hopetown Substack, Wilson warns that going into government with National would end in a dogfight Opportunity would almost certainly lose. Backing it from the cross-benches would be worse still, tying the party to National’s budgets while giving it so little influence that voters would sweep it away at the next election. National, Act and NZ First received more than $5 million in large donations this year, he points out, about four times as much as the left, before third-party spending is counted. If the specials fall the right way, he wants Opportunity to put “some inspirational backbone into a Labour-led government”.
4. Mike White (Post): Chris Finlayson says MMP ‘buggered’, calls for new voting system (paywalled)
A former National attorney-general wants MMP gone. Chris Finlayson told a post-election panel at the Queenstown Writers Festival, reported by the Post’s Mike White, that the system is “basically buggered” and an 11-seat overhang is untenable, and that New Zealand should look at Australia’s preferential system instead. Kiri Allan, beside him, said the enrolment changes affected the result and that the positions of both Luxon and Hipkins were arguably untenable. Luxon has lost all authority, in Finlayson’s view, but he can’t see anyone ready to replace him.
5. Jonathan Milne (Newsroom): In the Zuru mansion with the rich listers behind the new campaign to get rid of MMP
Jonathan Milne spent election weekend at the Mowbray family’s Coatesville mansion with the rich listers behind the Split Your Vote campaign, including Don Brash, Owen Jennings, Jim Grenon and Matthew Horncastle. Harry Mowbray’s theory is that female swing voters, voting on emotion, decide the party vote, and he now wants MMP gone altogether. He describes paying conservative influencers and helping fund Reality Check Radio’s newspaper adverts, all within his $17,000 cap as a third-party promoter. His son Nick is one of this year’s biggest donors to National ($250,000) and Act ($225,000). The next campaign is for what Mowbray calls positive MMP, with 100 electorate seats and just 20 top-up seats. “There’s no proportional part to this,” he says.
6. Derek Cheng and Chris Knox (Herald): Election 2026: Path to power for the left requires more than flipping seats. Use the interactive to see why (paywalled)
Wairarapa is the closest race, with National’s Mike Butterick 139 votes ahead of Labour’s Kieran McAnulty, but flipping it alone wouldn’t give the left the numbers. The Herald’s Derek Cheng and Chris Knox set out how the roughly 400,000 special votes could play out, with an interactive for testing your own scenarios. If the specials fell as they did in 2017, the Greens and Opportunity would each gain a seat and NZ First would lose one, producing a hung Parliament at 66 seats each. Add Wairarapa, and the left with Opportunity has a one-seat majority. A useful explainer to keep handy until 27 November.
7. Peter Dunne (Newsroom): The beginning of an end for National and Labour as they are (paywalled)
This was the worst MMP election yet for the two old parties, Peter Dunne writes in Newsroom, and he finds it hard to see either recovering soon. National, having shed almost a quarter of its 2023 support, will lead the next government only because of the overhang quirk, which leaves it in an almost unwinnable position for 2029. For Opportunity, Dunne recommends a loose confidence-and-supply arrangement from the cross-benches, since formally joining either side would likely be terminal. If Luxon won’t walk back his pre-election comments on Opportunity, Dunne thinks the caucus will do it for him, perhaps by installing Erica Stanford.
8. Deborah Coddington (Herald): Without Qiulae Wong as leader, Opportunity was doomed. She will be a formidable negotiator (paywalled)
Deborah Coddington didn’t vote for Opportunity, but she’s in no doubt the party was doomed without Qiulae Wong, who answered a Seek advertisement for a party leader and will, Coddington suspects, be a formidable negotiator. The former Act MP is scathing about Luxon, calling his past behaviour “monstrous”, and writes in the Herald that if he stubbornly refuses to deal with Wong, National should roll him and install Erica Stanford quickly. She compares Wong’s rockstar quality to Ardern, Peters and Key, but warns that herding six parties into a 10-year plan on health and education will be harder work than winning 6%.
9. Chris Trotter (LawNews): How Labour became a ‘weirdly schizoid political entity’ that lost touch with its traditional base
The three coalition parties won 52.78% of the party vote in 2023 and 49.9% this time. So why did the overhang strategy work? Chris Trotter’s answer in LawNews is that National’s grip on the electorates held because Labour’s candidates no longer appeal to ordinary voters, the legacy of a party run by the professional-managerial class. He calls Labour a “weirdly schizoid political entity”, committed to radical reforms it prefers not to talk about. His model candidate is Greg O’Connor, who, Trotter says, wouldn’t have been selected for Wellington North because he’s too old, too white, too male and too straight.
10. Susan Edmunds (RNZ): Why additional MPs may cost millions
Eleven extra MPs could cost at least $5.5 million in their first year, RNZ’s Susan Edmunds reports. The estimate uses a non-ministerial list MP as the benchmark. The salary is about $180,000 a year, but the first-year staff allocation alone is $215,818, before office expenses and IT. Parties also receive $26,500 per caucus member, and Parliament will have to find offices for the newcomers. For Shamubeel Eaqub the bigger issue is trust in politics, already at a record low. “This kind of stuff makes it worse,” he says.
Below the paywall are 78 more summaries and then 47 further links. They cover how many votes it would have taken to cost the right its majority, Harry Mowbray’s claim that a full vote-split would have produced 36 overhang seats, where Parliament will put 131 MPs, Chlöe Swarbrick accusing Luxon of lying about the enrolment changes, why the count still takes 20 days, a record number of Māori MPs, the silver trays at National’s caucus, the Te Pāti Māori MPs who nearly quit and then got the party’s best results, David Farrar’s AI-modelled odds on a Hipkins government, the one in five Green votes that came from the Māori roll, the Rhodes Scholar Labour ranked 64th on its list, the Opportunity MP who once lobbied for bottom trawlers and joined NZ First, Michael Laws on double-dipping, David Seymour on National’s claim to Finance, Shane Jones’ warning to the Electricity Authority board, RNZ’s $12m deficit and unauthorised overdraft, the $200,000 cost of a child’s first five years, and why Eric Crampton is watching who becomes housing minister.