New Zealand Election Results 2020
Map template for the 2020 New Zealand general election. By Erinthecute via Wikimedia Commons
The preliminary results are in for New Zealand’s election 2020, the number of seats per party (for our 120 seat Parliament) are:
- Labour: 64 (up from 46)
- National: 35 (down from 54)
- Greens: 10 (up from 8)
- Act: 10 (up from 1)
- Maori Party: 1 (up from 0)
- New Zealand First: 0 (down from 9)
On these numbers, Labour has enough seats to govern alone (though they might still make a deal with The Greens in the spirit of coalition building), No party in the MMP era has managed this, and Labour had their best popular vote result since 1951.
Final results (including Special Votes from people who live overseas or have recently moved or enrolled) won’t be available until November 6th. There may be some change in the numbers of seats in the final vote tally, especially since the Maori party’s one seat comes from an electorate race they are only just winning (9473 to 9058).
The referendum votes have not yet been counted, so we won’t get any results from those until October 30th. I’ll write a full retrospective once we get the referendum and final electoral results in.
Complete absolute dominance by the Labour Party. Strange how the voters reward competence that way.Report
I don’t follow New Zealand politics at all, but I found the linked interview with a National Party politician really interesting, mostly because of how it contrasts with US media. The problems in our country go a lot deeper than merely politicians who lie.
https://twitter.com/MollyJongFast/status/1317808494884552704Report
It looks like their press is almost as bad as our press. Objectivity and fairness has been totally rejected as any kind of journalistic standard. Only a few decades ago an interview like that would’ve gotten the journalist fired. In the old days, viewers couldn’t guess a what a journalist’s personal beliefs or political leanings were because the journalist could interview anybody without giving anything away.Report
I don’t know what that was supposed to be, but it wasn’t an interview. There was no intention to listen. She wasn’t even asking questions; I mean, the sentences were structured as questions, but she was just telling him off. Opposing candidates behave better than this.Report
OK, so a little context there.
That is Jami-Lee Ross being interviewed by Newshub’s Tova O’Brien. Now Jami-Lee Ross is not a National MP any more, he was elected as part of National in 2017, but he left the National Party in 2018 after a very public dispute with then-leader Simon Bridges. He remained in Parliament as an Independent.
Earlier this year, presumably in response to his negligible prospects for re-election, he decided to join forces with Advance New Zealand, a lunatic fringe party whose policy platform derives entirely from the floor sweepings of 4Chan conspiracy theories.
To be clear, the mainstream right wants nothing to do with Advance New Zealand – their political positions aren’t really coherent enough to fit onto the political description, and National has no love for Jami-Lee Ross. David Seymour, who leads Act called Billy Te-Kahika (Advance New Zealand’s leader), in these exact words, “a fucking idiot”. Advance New Zealand received less than 1% of the vote on Saturday.
This is not the mainstream right being beaten up on by some radically left-wing journalist. This is a man who lit his own political career on fire, then tried to salvage it by selling some of Parliament’s integrity to a bunch of lunatics. And then when that failed utterly O’Brien refused to accept soggy platitudes in place of answers and wouldn’t allow him to continue to spew misinformation into the public domain (she only shut him down when he tried to get into nonsense about COVID being no deadlier than influenza).Report
Advance New Zealand, a lunatic fringe party whose policy platform derives entirely from the floor sweepings of 4Chan conspiracy theories.
So, it’s like our Republican Party.Report
No, it sounds more like the Democrats who see Russians under every bed and white supremacists behind every tree. They’re still at it.Report
You wouldn’t interview David Duke or Ted Wheeler this way.Report
A journalist shouldn’t let a subject get away with dodging questions, nor should they allow their subject to lie unchallenged on air. That’s the difference between an interview and a puff piece.Report
She wasn’t challenging the answers, though. She wasn’t listening to them enough to do so. Now, I don’t know New Zealand speech patterns (and I’m not saying that facetiously) but typically in English there’s an audible question mark at the end of a question. She wasn’t doing that. She’s insult him and “ask a question”, he’d answer, she’d re-insult and re-ask, he’d re-answer, and she’d add another insult and move onto the next question. I know nothing about the context but I can think of a half-dozen follow-up questions she could have asked in order to dig deeper. She wasn’t looking for information. She wasn’t, in any real sense, challenging him. It was the exact opposite of a puff piece, but that’s not the same thing as an interview.Report
This.Report
But you should interview Donald Trump this way.Report