I think you may be interested in my take on three by-elections in Australasia that may excite you – just as my interest has been excited.

It may well be that my fascination is academic only, but I think readers may be interested in my take on three by-elections in Australasia that may excite you – just as my interest has been excited. The first was held on Saturday 6 September and the second on Saturday 13 September 2025, a week apart. The third will be held on a Saturday in the future, the precise date of which has yet to be determined. The cause of the first by-election was a tragic death. The second was caused by the most extraordinary resignation in Australian political history. The cause of the third will be an entirely conventional resignation. The similarity of the three is that only one member is elected. Otherwise, it would be said that different electoral systems apply to each contest.

First, there was the 6 September by-election for Tamaki Makaurau for the NZ House of Representatives. New Zealand has a proportional representation system (known as Mixed Member Proportional or MMP) but it is quite unlike the Tasmanian Hare-Clark system. I am very critical of MMP while strongly supporting Hare-Clark, the main difference being that MMP creates two classes of member while Hare-Clark creates only one type of member – as it should be. The New Zealand House of Representatives has 123 members, being 72 directly elected from single-member constituencies and 51 party-list members.

The 72 directly elected members come from 49 North Island general electorates, 16 South Island general electorates and seven Maori seats. People of Maori descent can choose on which electoral register to be enrolled which, in my opinion, is fair enough – but the voter cannot chop and change. At each census a choice is made which remains the voter’s choice until the next census.

Now suppose that the people of New Zealand had chosen to take my advice and installed the Hare-Clark system. Suppose also that the Maori seats had been filled by seven members elected from New Zealand as a whole voting as one electorate. The result, I think, would have been roughly this in the Maori seats: three for the Maori Party, three Labour and one for the Green Party. Support among Maoris for parties of the right is so low that I don’t think parties of the right would have won any Maori seats. At most the National Party might have secured just one Maori seat in a very good year.

That would have been sensible and fair – but it was not to be. Instead, there are seven single-member Maori electoral divisions, each electing one member by first-past-the-post voting and counting of votes. The voter places a tick in the circle beside the candidate of the voter’s choice – and that is that. The seven Maori divisions include one for the entirety of metropolitan Auckland. It is the smallest in area and is called Tamaki Makaurau. The other six are quite large, including countryside and smaller cities.

The most recent general election took place on 14 October 2023. The biggest vote in Tamaki Makaurau was 10,068 for Ms. Takutai Tarsh Kemp, of the Maori Party, technically known as Te Pati Maori. Coming in second was the sitting Labour member, Peeni Henare, with 10,026 votes while third was Darleen Tana of the Green Party with 2,925. Also, 829 votes were cast for Hannah Tamaki describing herself as “Vision New Zealand”. Finally, there were 1,275 votes for the National Party candidate, so the total formal vote was 25,123 and the media described Kemp as having won with a majority of only 42 votes.

Pundit expectations were that the by-election would be hotly contested, and the result would be very close. Labour chose former member Peeni Henare as its candidate. Being highly respected personally, he was thought to be in with a real chance. I never accepted that. My view was that the system, far from being fair (as claimed by its supporters) discriminates against Labour and in favour of the Maori Party. Why would Maori voters choose a male Labour candidate who was already a member of the House of Representatives?

Australians have difficulty to understand that. However, it is the case in New Zealand that a candidate can both seek election to be a directly elected local member but also be on the party list. Therefore, Henare lost Tamaki Makaurau to Kemp, but he was declared to be a member of the House of Representatives from the party list. In the jocular words of those NZ analysts who dislike the system: “Henare on 14 October was voted out on Saturday but came back in on Monday 16 October 2023.”

The votes cast at the by-election, on very nearly complete figures, were 6,031 for Oriini Kaipara of the Maori Party, 3,093 for Henare and a combined 206 for three other candidates, so the total formal vote was 9,330. That outcome shocked local pundits, partly because it was a landslide win in a result expected to be close but also because the turnout was so low. Neither feature of this result surprised me in the least. What else would one expect in a voluntary vote under a system so unfair as to give the Maori Party six safe seats and Labour only one Maori seat?

My view may well be warped by watching from the Australian side of the Tasman, but I think of the six Maori Party MPs as being the NZ equivalent of Australia’s Lidia Thorpe – but with a major difference. Thorpe’s position is accidental. She was elected by Victorians, not Aborigines. She will be defeated in May 2028. By contrast, the six Maori Party MPs were elected by Maori voters only. They will go on being re-elected.

The rules are so loaded against Labour the wonder of it is that there is one Labour member in a Maori seat. Her name is Cushla Tangaere-Manuel. She represents Ikaroa-Rawhiti which covers the entire east coast of the North Island. My strong advice to her for the October 2026 general election is this: do not place your name on the party list.

The electoral system for the NSW Kiama by-election was compulsory voting and the optional preferential vote. Unlike Tamaki Makaurau the previous Saturday the result was widely predicted to be a Labor win. It is a natural Labor seat which was won by Gareth Ward of the Liberal Party in the Liberal landslide victory of March 2011. He then held it in 2015 and 2019 as a Liberal. He resigned from the Liberal Party in 2020 after being charged with sexual offenses for which he was convicted in June 2025. He won as an independent in 2023 because he was a very good local member.

In March 2023 the final vote in Kiama was 23,018 for Gareth Ward (Independent) and 22,329 for Katelin McInerney (Labor). Fair minded Australians in a case like that are willing to give a guilty man the benefit of the doubt – because he had not been found by a court to be guilty. Given the lead that Ward placed into the saddlebags of his former party I think this by-election was a reasonably good result for the Liberals – especially because the timing was the worst possible for the Liberal Party. The other observation I would make is that the two-party system is alive and well in Australia.

The proper comparison to make for Kiama is to compare the Labor versus Liberal percentages at the 2023 general election with the Labor versus Liberal percentages at the 2025 by election. In 2023 it was 69.7 per cent Labor and 30.3% Liberal. At the by-election they are on even 60-40 distribution. Therefore, there has been a swing to Liberal of 9.7% in the two-party preferred vote.

The date for my third by-election has not been set because here I am engaging in speculation only. My prediction for the first by-election of the 48th Parliament is that it will take place in the south-eastern Melbourne outer metropolitan division of Isaacs. It will be caused by the resignation of Labor’s Mark Dreyfus who has held the seat since November 2007.

The Liberal Party needs a swing of 14.4% to take Isaacs from Labor. My prediction is that there will be a goodly swing to Liberal, but Labor will hold the seat with a reduced majority. The electoral system will be compulsory voting with the full preferential vote.