The election wait is over

Today's the day the shape of the new government finally comes into view. So what difference will the official results actually make?

Mōrena, and welcome to The Bulletin for Friday, November 3, by Catherine McGregor. Presented in partnership with Z Energy.

In today’s edition: Urban sprawl knocked back in Auckland and Canterbury; Postmortems try to uncover what went wrong at Supie; and all signs point to Chris Hipkins holding on as Labour leader. But first, it’s been a stressful few weeks for electorate candidates in tight races, but they’re about to be put out of their misery.

Coalition partners, start your engines

The wait is (almost) over. In a few hours – at 2pm, to be exact – the Electoral Commission will release the official vote count for Election 2023, allowing National and its potential partners to stop twiddling their thumbs and get started on forming a government. As Stuart Sowman-Lund writes in an excellent explainer, the final vote count includes approximately 567,000 special votes that weren’t included in the preliminary tally on October 14. Special votes are traditionally thought to favour the left since many of them come from overseas New Zealanders and students living away from home, but the effect could be muted this year if overseas voters decide en masse to punish Labour for the extended pandemic border closures. As for why it’s taken so long to count the votes, the complaints, criticisms and counter-arguments are all but exhausted by now, but if you’re still wondering what’s going on let us direct you once again to Graeme Edgeler’s very useful explainer. 

The electorates to watch

The final vote count will include both the individual electorate and party vote tallies. In a handful of electorates, razor-thin vote margins will have the leading candidates nervously counting down the hours to 2pm. Ones to watch include Nelson, where Labour’s Rachel Boyack currently trails National’s Blair Cameron by just 54 votes; Mount Albert, where Labour’s Helen White leads National’s Melissa Lee by 106 votes; Banks Peninsula, where National newcomer Vanessa Weenink is 83 votes ahead of Labour MP Tracey McLellan; and Te Atatū, where National newbie Angee Nicholas leads veteran Labour MP Phil Twyford by a stunningly tight 30 votes. In Māori seats Te Tai Tokerau and Tāmaki Makaurau the Labour candidates are leading their Te Pāti Māori rivals – but not by enough to be comfortable. As football legend Sir Alex Ferguson would say, it’s squeaky bum time for all involved. 

So what will the results actually mean?

In short: if Mount Albert flips, that would be (symbolically) great news for National. It would be a result totally unforeseeable ahead of election night. If Te Atatū, Nelson, Banks Peninsula or New Lynn fall back to Labour, that would be bad for the incoming government. It wouldn't change the overall number of seats National picks up but could see the return of experienced MPs like Phil Twyford.  The party vote share will also be keenly watched. According to the Herald’s Audrey Young, if both Act and NZ First are required for National to govern, and Act is substantially ahead of NZ First in the party vote, it’ll be an easy call for Luxon to keep Act inside Cabinet and NZ First outside. “But if the gaps between them narrows and they end up, say, both close to 8 per cent, it could be highly problematic for Luxon.”

No change at the top for Labour

While National gets down to business on forming a government, Labour will start bedding itself in as the opposition. Though the caucus still has two and a half months to endorse Hipkins as leader, RNZ’s Jane Patterson says the vote could take place as early as November 7. It seems Hipkins’ position is secure for now. “There will be resentment and recriminations over the loss, and a great deal aimed at Hipkins as leader, but for now there appear to be no active moves against him.” Hipkins’ camp is dismissing rumours that David Parker will challenge for the top job, Tova O’Brien’s reports. They’re confident that none of the caucus really wants a damaging leadership fight. Too many of them “lived through Labour’s nine long years in the wilderness with its revolving roulette of leaders, and they know the lasting damage it caused”.

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Urban sprawl knocked back in Auckland and Canterbury

Auckland Council has voted to decrease the amount of city fringe land available for development, citing flood risks and potential infrastructure costs. The areas had been designated by the council as “Future Urban”, a signal that they were likely to be rezoned as residential, and much of the land had seen massive price increases ahead of the expected rezoning. Now “land speculators in rural Auckland could be left with hundreds of millions of dollars of property unable to be developed for decades”, Stuff’s Todd Niall reports. The land is around Kumeū-Huapai and Riverhead in the northwest, Hatfields Beach in the north, and Takaanini and Drury-Ōpaheke in the south. “This protects farmland, supports growth within city limits where existing infrastructure is not fully utilised – Auckland is sprawling too far,” said Mayor Wayne Brown. Meanwhile commissioners have rejected plans for an 850-home development in Ohaka, north of Christchurch, citing “the existing rural nature of Ohoka, and the lack of public transport and local jobs”, Liz McDonald reports for The Press (paywalled). Waimakariri District Council will decide whether to adopt the commissioners’ recommendations at a meeting on Tuesday. 

What went wrong at Supie?

An investor and former director of failed supermarket competitor Supie says founder Sarah Balle is not to blame for the collapse and he would back her again. Talking to RNZ’s The Detail, he says the fact of the matter is that most shoppers stayed loyal to the supermarket duopoly, despite Supie’s lower prices."I'm not going to say that Supie's demise was the fault of consumers, not at all. But if we want competition in the marketplace we need to support competitive initiatives," he says. Newsroom’s Jonathan Milne disagrees. Supie was growing a frantic pace, he says, but it wasn’t able to raise the money to invest in infrastructure to keep up. Milne has written his own analysis of what went wrong, including the story of the company’s final few days. Milne’s piece ends with a plea from Balle to investors, recorded around the time they began to get cold feet. “No [overseas chains are] coming anytime soon. The government's not going to do anything.Without a Supie, we'll still be stuck with a supermarket duopoly for the next decade. That's just a fact."

How leaders can learn from their mistakes

After leaving the CEO position at Z Energy, Mike Bennetts became an executive coach and has just published his own book: Being Extraordinary by Confronting Your Ordinary. In this week’s When the Facts Change, Bennetts talks to Bernard Hickey about how leadership is different from management, and how leaders can learn from their mistakes.

Click and Collect

• The bond market is growing in confidence that no further OCR rises are coming, and has fully priced in a rate cut by next November.

• Peer-to-peer lending platform Lending Crowd is closing down.

• The size of the public service has continued to grow, and spending on contractors and consultants spend is slightly up on last year, according to new figures.

• Erin Patterson, the Australian woman who cooked a deadly meal using poisonous mushrooms, has been charged with three counts of murder and five counts of attempted murder. Three of the attempted murder charges relate to incidents in 2021 and 2022.  

Right now on The Spinoff

Rachel Judkins ranks the Wordle spinoffs and ripoffs – all 50 of them. Scams are hard to pictures, and that's part of the problem, Shanti Mathias argues. Avigail Allan, an Israeli Jew in Aotearoa, explains why she supports Palestinian freedom. Hera Lindsay Bird advises a reader considering confronting her shitty ex. Claire Mabey asks children's books superstar Katherine Rundell 14 searching questions. Alex Casey remembers when a death metal band played on The Erin Simpson Show.

Sporting snippets

• Controversial RWC ref Wayne Barnes is retiring, saying the online abuse has become too much.

• India is in the Cricket World Cup semifinal after beating Sri Lanka by 302 runs.

This newsletter has been edited to reflect an error in the previous version that suggested electorate seat wins for Labour would alter the overall composition of parliament. That is determined by the party vote. 

Got some feedback about The Bulletin, or anything in the news? Get in touch with me at thebulletin@thespinoff.co.nz.

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