Special votes could reshape Parliament as minor parties court leaders while waiting for the final tally.
National Party incumbent Ryan Hamilton and Labour candidate Georgie Dansey discussed the tight race, impending special votes, and whether either candidate might seek a recount, 1News reported on its Breakfast program.
Both candidates lead by a narrow margin while the electoral commission processes the remaining ballots. Special votes traditionally alter seat allocations, leaving campaigns on edge across the country.
Opportunity Party leader Qiulae Wong met with Labour leader Chris Hipkins as both figures waited for the final results of the special votes to be revealed, RNZ reported.
A spokesperson for the Opportunity Party told RNZ that both leaders talked generally about the election campaign and everyone’s desire for more collaboration and positivity during a meeting that lasted about an hour.
“Everyone is waiting for the special votes to come in but it’s great to build out these relationships with all party leaders,” the spokesperson said.
Hipkins was asking for a sort of better sense of what we want to achieve, according to Wong, who added that bottom lines were discussed broadly with Hipkins also. She said that an alignment exists particularly around environmental matters, alongside innovation and science as areas of mutual interest.
Wong also met with National leader Christopher Luxon to discuss areas of agreement and policy motivations, the NZ Herald reported. Luxon campaigned on not working with the Opportunity Party, but his stance has since softened regarding general relationship-building with other political leaders.
“I think that we had a shared background in the private sector and he’d done some work in sustainability at Unilever and Air New Zealand, so we were talking about that quite a bit,” Wong told the Herald.
A spokesperson or participant said that alignment exists on KiwiSaver thinking with the National Party, alongside areas like artificial intelligence where they want to work with many political parties, and infrastructure. They also discussed areas of disagreement on tax and other matters without getting too detailed.
Wong said that bottom lines were talked through very broadly, noting that the party is not currently in a kingmaker position and not having those kinds of discussions. Fisheries were also discussed generally as an area of shared concern, and Wong said that she had no favourites at this point and that it is still very early days.
As the final ballots are counted, the exact composition of the next government remains unconfirmed pending the release of the official results by the Electoral Commission.
