How the Māori seats could hold the key to this election

Always intriguing, the electorates may prove decisive in 2026 in more ways than one.

Since 1867, the Māori electorates have been the scene of enthralling drama. Since MMP was introduced there have been clean sweeps across the seats for New Zealand First, Labour and (almost) Te Pāti Māori. It’s not yet 12 years since John Key, in coalition with the Māori Party, said that adhering to his party’s then policy to abolish the seats would spark “hīkois from hell”.

At the last election, six of the seven seats were won by Te Pāti Māori. Today, after an extended, well-documented procession of internal bloodletting, the party holds four. Of all the races, those in Te Tai Tokerau and Te Tai Tonga – where the sitting MPs are no longer part of the TPM caucus – may be the most fascinating to watch, said Lara Greaves, speaking on an episode of the podcast At Large with Toby Manhire.

But, with just days to go to the roll-swapping deadline, there is another layer of fascination, centred on the electoral maths in electorates where those enrolled have often proved savvier to strategic voting – a calculated overhang. 

“With our electoral system, good old MMP, you have your electorate vote and you have party vote,” said Greaves, associate professor in politics at Victoria University of Wellington. “The party vote is the one that determines the makeup of the house… If your party wins more electorates than your party vote entitles you to in the House, you still get those electorate seats. They can’t take them away from you.”

That in turn means adding seats to the default number of 120. Some have toyed with the idea of Te Pāti Māori, with an eye on removing the incumbent government, encouraging their supporters to vote TPM for electorate MP and Labour for the party vote, explicitly or tacitly.

“The idea is, if you add, say, seven extra MPs from the Maori electorates, then you’d have seven more left-leaning MPs, and they would help make up the majority to form a government of the 127 or whatever it was.”

It was far from a straightforward prospect, however, “It creates a lot of issues because firstly you’ve got to nudge-nudge-wink-wink people.” That was risky in any seat; if it were a Māori electorate that would only grow, she said. If you consider the outrage over deals in Epsom or Ohariu, she said, “and then if we add a Māori layer to that, the public’s going to frown a bit more, right?”

And, were a handful of seats generated by overhang to prove crucial in determining which bloc became government, there was a reasonable argument that could be made about legitimacy, she said. 

“Any time when you see people playing the system, people are going to look down on it… We don’t want people to feel like the political system is being played in some way.”

To get every episode of At Large with Toby Manhire in your podcast feed, follow here for Spotify, or here for Apple. You can watch the lot on YouTube by subscribing to the Spinoff here or browsing all the episodes here.

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