Which electorate will be scrapped?

Saturday, 8 February 2025

Greg O'Connor, David Seymour, Tamatha Paul, Julie Anne Genter. All are MPs who have electorates that could be in the firing line of electoral changes.

It’s a waiting game, but the capital could be in the firing line as the Representation Commission mulls the key decision to scrap an electorate ‒ for the first time since MMP began in 1996.

The North Island will be losing a seat and speculation varies over where that may be from. Regardless, it will have a ripple effect and cause political parties ‒ and particularly some MPs ‒ concern.

StatsNZ has looked at which electorates have too many or too few people. Clusters of “too few” (that’s more than 5% under of the 69,875-person quota) are in Wellington (Rongotai, Ōhāriu and Wellington Central) and just over 10 electorates concentrated around central Auckland.

It seems obvious an electorate would come from one of those cities. But it’s zooming out that could tell the story and it’s the electorates nearby when it comes to Auckland.

Takanini, to the south, is exceeding the electorate quota by a whopping 18%, while Kaipara ki Mahurangi is the second largest with 15% over. It’s not just those electorates. Papakura, which sits under Takanini, is over, while to the north, Upper Harbour and Whangaparāoa are both over, and even further, the geographically large electorate of Northland also is over quota.

A rough calculation by The Post suggests Auckland and Northland is about 30,000 people under quota overall ‒ so if the populations were shuffled around from the nearby electorates to even out the seats, the area would still likely be short. Wellington is in the same position, about 21,000 short in the area.

Removing a seat to sort out Auckland and Northland could be desirable to even out the over and under quota areas. Whereas for Wellington, there’s less wiggle room ‒ all the surrounding areas are within the tolerance levels.

However, other factors come into play when the Representation Commission considers boundary shifts, including projected population growth.

According to Infometrics, the annual percentage change in growth in the year to June 30, 2024, of Wellington was 0.2% and 0.8% for the Wellington region. Auckland was at 2.5% ‒ above the national average of 1.8%. Over the five years to 2024, Wellington City averaged 0.2% growth, while Auckland was 1.4%.

Wellington has had numerous changes to its electorates over the years ‒ Miramar, Island Bay, Eastern Hutt, Onslow, Pencarrow and Wellington-Karori are all now long gone.

Jenny Shipley with Winston Peters in 1998.

Wellington Central, created in 1905, has had its share of change too. It was more recently described by some as a “safe” Labour seat, before Green MP Tamatha Paul’s 2023 win, and despite then-ACT leader Richard Prebble’s stint as its MP in 1996.

And while some things change, others stay the same.

In 1998, Winston Peters, also the deputy prime minister then, issued a statement suggesting Prebble return to the electorate from his “latest junket” ahead of proposed boundary changes.

“Of course he's afraid because the wealthy areas like Khandallah, Ngaio and Cashmere have been carved out of his seat, prompting another mad outburst,” Peters said.

Peter Dunne MP for Ohariu in 1984 on a forklift, and Ashley Palmer at the controls of the adjustable forklift in front of the Beehive on parliament grounds.

“The trouble with Mr Prebble is that he only represents the Rich Upwardly Mobile People (RUMP), and he's threatened by a more balanced cross-section of voters.”

The Post sought comment from Prebble for this article, but he was in Japan.

Another one of the city’s notable electorates, Ōhāriu, has had many names and taken many forms ‒ but it hasn’t had many MPs.

It was 1984 when a 30-year-old Peter Dunne ran successfully for Labour against National’s incumbent Hugh Templeton and the New Zealand Party leader Bob Jones.

By 1993, its boundaries changed and it was now Onslow, then Ohariu-Belmont by 1996, and back to Ōhāriu by 2008. Dunne, then the leader of United Future, outlasted the changes to 2017.

Greg O’Connor and his red 1974 Austin Martin.

Dunne believes Ōhāriu and Epsom are the “two obvious possibilities” for electorates to be culled, with Ōhāriu the likely Wellington target due to its location.

“Rongotai is about 10% under quota at the moment, so that will encroach over Wellington Central, Wellington Central is a similar size under quota, which means it encroaches into Ōhāriu ‒ by that time Ōhāriu is nearly being cut in half to accommodate the changes,” he says.

“Whether that means they’ll say, we’ll just cut our losses and build a new seat out of the remnants of Ōhāriu and Mana, I don’t know, but it’s purely a mathematical game at that point.

“And the poor old members of Parliament just have to sit and watch.’’

Ōhāriu MP Greg O’Connor is taking a glass-half-full approach to the situation. “There's so much to worry about in the world … that's just another one of those things. We'll just have to see what happens.”

Wherever the seat is taken from, “all of that's going to add to the uncertainty this year”, Dunne says.

“Normally, boundary changes end up being fairly neutral. But occasionally, they do chip rather heavily on one side, which could influence an election outcome.”

Politics professor Richard Shaw says as far as the functioning of the electoral system is concerned, losing a seat is positive “other obviously than for the person whose seat it currently is, but that's a private issue, not a public issue”.

“The fewest list MPs you have relative to the number of constituency MPs, the harder it becomes for MMP to deliver proportionality.

“It's healthier for us to have an electoral system which can deliver proportionality, than it is for us to slowly … slip back into what would functionally be a first past the post system with all of the inequities that delivered.”

But wherever it comes from, “it will have a ripple effect”.

“It will have significant effects in all kinds of different ways.”

Shaw also believes there is still something in the political party psyche in New Zealand that says if you don't have at least one constituency seat or MP there is somehow something not quite legitimate about a party. He points to the Greens’ “extremely emotional” response to Chlöe Swarbrick’s victory in Auckland Central.

“But, if the primary question is, how would the loss of a seat in Tamaki Makaurau or Wellington influence the result of an election, and by that what we really meant was, is this going to have any impact upon the formation of governments, then I think losing a seat in Wellington is probably likely to be slightly less consequential.

ACT leader David Seymour isn’t letting go of Epsom without a fight.

“Labour will never find itself in a situation, and neither would the National Party, in which the party vote is so close to the number of constituency seats that the constituency battle has become determinative.

“But that might happen for the ACT party in Auckland.”

ACT “just would have ceased to exist for long periods” had it not been for the National Party standing candidates aside in Epsom, Shaw says. But that’s not the case now.

“They are a continuous feature of the parliament,” Shaw said, referring to higher party support since 2020.

“But they're not safe. So Epsom really matters to them, and it matters emotionally as well.”

Asked about the possibility, Epsom MP David Seymour says he would be “mortified if the greatest electorate in the history of Westminster democracy” was to be removed by the Representation Commission.

“Let's just see what they say. I mean, they could do anything. There's other speculation they'll remove an electorate from the Wellington region.”

Asked if ACT would be putting in a submission for the boundary changes, Seymour says “you betcha”.

“We'll be saying that the principles are that infrequent change is important … communities of interest are important, that Epsom actually has shown that it has those things over a long period of time, and that there's a good case that among the priorities should be keeping electorates like Epsom ‒ long-standing electorates ‒ together.”

Asked about the possibility of losing an electorate, Labour’s campaign chairperson Kieran McAnulty says a “New Zealand without an Epsom MP would look pretty good right now, but I have no real views on the electorate itself”.

“We don't know whether Wellington is going to lose one. We don't know whether Epsom is going to change.”

Wellington Central MP Tamatha Paul says seats have to be earned, “so whatever happens with the Representation Commission will happen, but we have to keep fighting for those seats”.

The Representation Commission meets again this month to set the proposed boundaries, which will be released on March 24. Consultation and public hearings will take place until June 18, with the final boundaries released on August 8 and apply to next year’s election.

The Representation Commission is chaired by Judge Kevin Kelly and comprises public officials, a Government representative (Roger Sowry) and an Opposition representative (Andrew Little).