Looks very unlikely there will be any other result besides National/ACT majority. Without having to worry about other coalition partners, this will probably be our most right-wing government of the MMP era. A lot of the National caucus are pretty right-wing at heart (rather than Labour, where a lot of them are pretty centrist at heart). So ACT will probably get more wins out of the coalition agreement than you might expect. NACT should be able to keep the government running smoothly as it was under Key, meaning they will be odds on to win a second and probably third term.
Which means cost of living, inequality and environment/climate issues are all set to get substantially worse.
Well fuck
No party in the MMP era outside Labour/National had ever won more than 1 general electorate seat (i.e. besides the Maori seats) before this election. Now it looks like Act will win 2 and Greens will win 3... that seems like a significant moment.
Funnily enough there is probably a chance Chris loses
Fuck
Wow it sucks that TOP didn't do better; but what sucks even more is that NZ Loyal got 1.15%; the crazys were out in force this year.
Hmm, there does seem to be a reasonably strong break towards Labour in the later counted votes. It could mean National end up with as low as 38% (especially after specials). If TPM win 5 seats, there'd be 122 MPs with overhang. That could mean National/Act will fall just short of a majority and require support from NZF.
So going on how things changed as voters were counted, it would appear that the early voting broke more for Nat / Act, and then the day of voting broke for Lab / G. NZF & TPM stayed relatively consistent throughout the night. This makes sense, blue-collar working people are somewhat more likely to vote Labour than National, and are less likely to have time to get to one of the fewer advance voting posts, than the typically white-collar / retired voters who are somewhat more likely to vote for the right.
The vote totals have now tightened up considerably on whether National can form a government with just Act; such that I am interested to know how many overseas / special votes there might be, and if any of them have been counted yet. If there's enough of them, and they tipped more Labour/Green than National then it might be enough to pull another vote from the right to the left, and given Parliament has an overhang this term Luxon would need to pick up the phone to someone to get an outright majority, at least on confidence & supply.
Another big talking point for me is that one in every twenty voters this election has no representation in Parliament at all due to the threshold requirements for minor parties.
