National’s James Meager (Ngāi Tahu) will represent the Rangitata for another term and is quietly confident it will be as an MP in Government rather than opposition.
Meager arrived in Wellington on Monday, pleased with his big electorate win, gutted for some of his colleagues and questioning if the MMP system needs some work.
He won the Rangitata Electorate by a landslide, topping the preliminary vote count with 22,236, a margin of 13,917 votes over his closest rival - Labour’s Sange Malama (8319).
He was happy with his big electorate win, “increasing the margin, while many others around the country dropped a bit.
“It’s a show of confidence in us locally”
The overall election results were far from being as clear-cut.
“We’ll have to wait for the special votes to come through and see what the final result will be.
“We are pretty confident it’s not going to change too much, and with all the permutations going around, there is a much clearer pathway for us to continue governing than the other side.”
He said National leader Chris Luxon will have “his top team doing the negotiating” once they get a clearer picture of what the numbers look like.
With several senior National MPs, including Nicola Willis, Chris Bishop, Paul Goldsmith and Gerry Brownlee out of a job, Meager could be set for a rise up the ranks.
“I haven’t thought about my potential roles post-negotiations.
“I am gutted for some of my colleagues who were incredibly skilled, talented, and made huge contributions to the country, and have missed out.
“I am thinking about what I do locally over the next three years.
“While we may be in a wait-and-see period, the job of an MP doesn’t stop and my offices are open.”
He said the election night had a different vibe this time around as “there was some uncertainty around how the numbers would fall.”
How they fell remains uncertain, with neither major party having a clear mandate on their own, and coalition negotiations will determine the next government, which will be bigger after split-voting campaigns blew up the size of Parliament to a record 131 seats.
Meager acknowledged that a lot of people are confused about a system where National won so many electorates, currently holding 42 out of 71 total electorates, and are still on the edge of not being able to form a government.
While electorate votes are first past the post, the MMP is “supposed to focus on proportionality, so that as many people’s votes count as possible”.
“The number of votes you get in the country are represented by the seats you have.”
Meager chaired the post-election review run by the Justice Committee in his first term and expects it will take a harder look at the MMP system.
“All this strategic stuff, whether it made a difference or not, it is certainly going to be worth looking at in the post-election review as to whether there are changes that need to be made to the system.”
He believes an election should be about choosing the person and party that best represents you, and it’s as simple as that”.
“As soon as we have a system that makes people vote for someone or a party they don’t like just to shut someone else out, it starts to undermine the integrity of the system.”
LDR is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air.
