Published in The Australian (Sydney), 12 November 2026
New Zealand voted on Saturday, but the final result will not be known until November 27. Roughly 400,000 special votes, about one in seven, have yet to be counted.
They come from voters abroad, outside their home electorates or missing from the printed roll. Each arrives in an envelope that officials must check against the roll before the vote counts.
Australians are used to waiting for postal votes, too. But a late count will usually not change the overall outcome. Postal votes, like ordinary ones, can decide only individual electorates. Under New Zealand’s proportional system, special votes can do that too, in close electorates such as Wairarapa. But they can also shift the nationwide party vote and, with it, the makeup of the whole parliament.
Three years ago, National and ACT had a majority of seats on election night but lost it once the specials were in. That is how New Zealand First got back into government.
Parliament normally has 120 seats. But this time, it has grown because National and Te Pati Maori both won more electorates than their party votes entitle them to. The three coalition parties hold 67 of 131 seats on the preliminary count, one more than they need to govern.
The calculation of seats in the coming weeks will be unusual. National’s 42 seats come entirely from electorates, so a further fall in its party vote would cost it nothing. If it loses an electorate to Labour, Labour does not gain anything. Instead, parliament shrinks.
The danger lies with ACT and New Zealand First. If either loses a list seat, it goes straight to the other side. That would hurt the coalition twice as much as the loss of a National electorate. If both National and one of its partners lost a seat each, the House would be tied at 65 seats each.
The coalition will most likely hold on, but until the count is final there is nothing to negotiate.
All the suspense over the final result hides how disastrous this election was for National. On preliminary figures, it came second, narrowly, to Labour on the party vote. Its share fell from 38 per cent in 2023 to 29 per cent. It is the first major party under MMP to win no list seats at all.
Last month I explained in these pages how that could happen. Now it has, and the casualties include National’s frontbench. Nicola Willis, deputy leader and Finance Minister, did not stand in an electorate and is out of parliament. So is the Speaker, Gerry Brownlee.
Chris Bishop, the Housing Minister and number three on the list, has conceded in Hutt South. Paul Goldsmith, beaten by ACT leader David Seymour in Epsom, is gone as well.
Labour has little to celebrate either. It gained barely 2½ points on its 2023 rout. The smaller parties took a combined 41 per cent of the vote, more than at any election since MMP began.
Australia is going the same way. At its election last year, more voters gave their first preference to minor parties and independents than to the Coalition.
On election night, Christopher Luxon said National was “once again the largest party in parliament” and had “a pathway to form the next government”. Both claims are true. Yet speculation is rife in Wellington that he will not see out the term.
The talk is that he will either hand over to a successor or be rolled by his caucus. He has already survived two leadership votes this year, and few expect him to survive a third. Business leaders surveyed last month doubted he would stay on as leader even if the coalition won.
There is also speculation about whether Winston Peters will carry on as Foreign Minister. He has held the post three times and served the country well. But in July, Peters told a Chinese-born Green MP to “go back to your own country”. Opportunity, whose votes the coalition may yet need, responded that it would not support any government with him as foreign minister.
National’s strategists will be asking what all this means.
One complication is Peters himself. Some in National fear he sees the coalition agreement as a personal one between himself and Luxon. When Luxon called a confidence vote in April, Peters warned of “consequences” and said a new leader would have meant reshaping the agreement.
So National will want any handover to be orderly, giving Peters no excuse to leave the coalition or renegotiate its terms. A change early in the term would also force a reshuffle on a cabinet only just sworn in.
Recent history is not encouraging either. Bill English took over from John Key, and Chris Hipkins from Jacinda Ardern, less than a year before an election. Neither had time to settle in, and neither was prime minister a year later.
Then there is Luxon’s seat of Botany. National has no list MPs, so any of its MPs who quits during the term forces a by-election. Botany would stay blue, but a by-election is the last thing a coalition with a majority of one or two seats would want.
Luxon’s relations with Seymour and Peters were often strained, and they are on his side of politics. Opportunity would be harder still. He spent the campaign ruling out any deal with its leader, Qiulae Wong. On Monday night, he met her for an hour and called the talk “very constructive”. The turnaround has not helped his credibility.
It would be odd if National’s strategists were not looking for a way out, and a vacancy at foreign affairs might offer one.
If Peters did give up the portfolio, whether by choice or as the price of Opportunity’s support, it could go to Luxon as part of an orderly handover.
That would play to Luxon’s strengths. In last month’s survey of business leaders, he scored 4.3 out of five for promoting New Zealand business abroad, easily his best mark. In March 2025, he led a large business delegation to Delhi and came home with free-trade talks under way.
It would let him step down without losing face, and it would spare National a by-election. The earlier it happened, the longer his successor would have to build a record before the 2029 election. With Willis and Bishop out, the obvious successor is Erica Stanford, the Education Minister.
Australian readers will recognise the scenario. In 2010, Kevin Rudd lost the prime ministership to Julia Gillard and became her foreign minister. He used the job as a stage, resigned in 2012 to challenge her and was back in The Lodge a year later.
But Luxon would not be Rudd. Rudd was dangerous because many voters still liked him and part of his caucus wanted him back and remained popular. Luxon has never been preferred as prime minister by more than 28 per cent of voters in the main polls. The closer parallel is David Cameron, whom Luxon has long cited as an inspiration and who served as foreign secretary under Rishi Sunak.
Whether National goes down this path is for the party to decide. The slow count gives it more than a fortnight to think it through.