National Party Voter Decline

And of course, uh he passed the vote of confidence uh in himself and won it and came out and um I I don't think you'll see any murmurings as a result of this. And I think what New Zealanders have to get used to is um the MMP environment where the two main parties, uh national and labor. Uh one may um come in on election day ahead of the other, if any which way, but it really depends, as all MMP parliaments do, depends on the uh minor parties. That's with the exception, of course, of the low uh the COVID election that brought um the Labour Party um uh in on its own, which is very rare under the MMP system. But if you look back to um uh 1996, the first year of MMP, um, well, in fact, not the first year, because it's Winston Peters got 17 seats in the first year, but just go back um to what happened in 2017. Yeah, uh, which is when Labour uh Jacinda Dern came into power. The Nets uh came home on election day with 34% of the vote, Labour 28%. Now, you would have thought, and everybody assumed that uh New Zealand First would go out and uh give the election to the National Party because most of the public decided that they wanted to continue uh with a party that was started with John Key and um uh left over to Bill English to do the job. But uh he didn't do that, so he turned it around, and that was the first example since 1996 with uh that we've seen of MMP actually working, even though a lot of people didn't like it. So we're talking now, you know, uh the Torbutt Mills poll at the moment, a national twenty-nine, in fact ironically, it's all almost uh the same differences between the two parties, only in reverse of 2017, if you held an election today. But of course, the person who would decide who was going to be the Prime Minister would again be Winston Peter.