TRANSKRIPT 🔗
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Speaker 1: To the Canterbury Mornings podcast with John McDonald from Newstalk ZB. How surprised are you by the outcome of Saturday's election? How surprised are you? Let me start by giving you a few of my thoughts. On Saturday afternoon, a mate asked me what I thought was going to happen. What's going to happen tonight? What's going to happen tonight? And I said that I thought Labour would win the party vote, but National would win more seats. and that Opportunity would get in with a 5.2% share of the party vote. That was as much as I was prepared to predict, when a lot of people seemed to be unwilling to do that, because no one really knew what was going to happen. It was pretty much spot on though, although yes, at this point Labour is ahead on party vote, but it's pretty much neck and neck. Labour's on 29.36, that was National's on 29.21, but technically Labour's ahead of If it was a bet, I would have won the bet. Minuscule numbers of actual votes between them. Quite amazing. I was right, too, about National getting more electorate seats than Labour. The preliminary results show National having 42 seats, all of them electorate seats, and Labour has 36 of those. 21 are electorate seats, 15 are list seats. And despite other commentators saying otherwise, I was right about Opportunity getting into Parliament. It was Just said I predicted they'd get 5.2. At the moment, they're sitting on 5.96. So overall, looks like the current coalition government, which is now the caretaker government, looks like they have enough to get another three years. At this stage, anyway, that's before the nearly 400,000 special votes are taken into account. Combined, the National Act New Zealand First Coalition has 67 Labour Greens to Party Māori, 57 opportunity, seven seats. So no surprises on those fronts. What I am surprised about, though, is the way National Leader Christopher Luxon has reacted compared to his coalition partners. Winston Peters and David Seymour, I think you would agree, wouldn't you, they've been somewhat reserved. Well, as reserved as those two can be. Especially when you consider that David Seymour in particular, he's got a bit to crow about with ACT having its best result ever, 10.9%, 13 MPs. Of course, he's doing what he did when he was on the show with us a couple of weeks back. He's pitching himself as the next finance minister. But overall, I think the ACT and New Zealand First leaders are conducting themselves as they should, given how things are after the weekend. Christopher Luxon, though, what a bombastic showing he made on Saturday night. It was midnight before he took to the stage after shaking hands and hugging, it seemed, every Tom, Dick and Harry at the National Party event in Auckland. Yesterday, he was at it again, telling reporters, oh, he thought, oh, I thought National, I thought we were on a very good campaign. Despite the fact that National's party share at the moment is down 9% on the last election, which means, of course, the likes of Nicola Willis, Chris Bishop, Paul Goldsmith and Gerry Brownlee, they're out. I'm not surprised by that, by the way, because that was almost kind of expected. But Luxon, he needs to take or listen to the advice he gave reporters yesterday. He told them to calm down. He said, well, I've got to calm down for three weeks. Get some rest. He needs to do that as well. Because not only has he delivered a result that can hardly be described as victorious, he's now also looking like going back on his word not to work in any way, shape or form with the Opportunity Party, which, can I say, doesn't surprise me. Because we all knew when he was ruling them out so emphatically during the campaign that he would be on the phone to Kule Wong if he needed to. Now, my pick is he's talking the way he is after Mark Mitchell and Erica Stanford both said on Saturday night, Before Luxon had even turned up at the event, they said that National would have to look at working with Opportunity. And as soon as they said that, Christopher Luxon, he had no choice, eh? Otherwise, he would have been ousted sooner rather than later. Now, that could still happen, but the olive branch to Opportunity might have bought him a bit more time. Speaking of time, have I forgotten about Chris Hipkins? No, I haven't. Chris Hipkins is well and truly on borrowed time. I mean, like Luxon, he has nothing to crow about. And I'm not the least bit surprised by that either.