OPINION
After spending the entire campaign making it clear Act’s David Seymour was his favourite and Winston Peters his “last resort”, National Party leader Christopher Luxon is suddenly hellbent on not picking favourites.
The final vote count delivered the result Luxon had invested a lot of time trying to avoid, depriving him of his slim election-day majority with Act and instead bringing New Zealand First well and truly into the picture.
So when he was asked who he called first out of Seymour and Peters after the final results on Friday, Luxon refused to say.
The luxury of having a favourite has been lost to him.
Ahead of him lies the task of putting together his Government. It will not be easy - or as Luxon himself said: “We’ve got a lot of complexity to manage.”
Winston Peters and his NZ First colleagues will be ecstatic - they come out with a slightly lower party vote than election night delivered - but a hell of a lot more clout.
They have gone from being a security blanket, a buffer, to being needed.
NZ First will not be sorry it chose to wait before those final results landed to negotiate in earnest with National. It can ask for a lot more now.
National will be asking itself if it was the author of its own misfortune as it digests the meal the special votes plonked on to Luxon’s plate - including NZ First moving from being a mere side dish to one of the main courses.
The very scenario National was trying to avoid through the campaign has happened.
It is now up to Luxon to avoid the consequence National itself had warned of during the campaign: the risk National would not be able to reach a deal with NZ First and end up sending the voters back to the polls.
That was always a blatant scare tactic (and didn’t work). A second election is a very remote possibility and always was.
None of the parties involved will want it, least of all Peters. Peters had to work hard to get NZ First back in Parliament. He will not want to put that at risk by going back to the polls, knowing full well it might not go so well for the party next time around.
As a result, so far both Peters and Seymour are making very grown-up noises about working together, despite the fire and brimstone of the campaign.
Luxon is wise to conduct his talks in as low-key a fashion as possible, with secret assignations in secret locations to stop steam rising as the various parties get bailed up outside by the media. Having a daily circus of party leaders dropping cryptic hints is not his cup of tea.
The National leader will now have the mother of all negotiating jobs ahead. In theory, it should work. There is significant policy overlap between the three parties.
But what price will NZ First exact for its win? Will Act be able to stomach it? What will Act demand? Will there be tantrums if one deems the other has got more?
Then there is National’s own wish list. What will it have to spend on other parties’ wish lists and what will it need to be put on ice? While Act and National’s talks might be well-progressed, they will almost certainly have to revise them now. And it doesn’t seem as if NZ First’s talks have gone beyond courtesy calls.
Seymour may well be feeling more pain about all of this than Luxon.
On the election night results, Seymour would have hoped to have Act ministers in Cabinet and NZ First outside.
Instead, as Luxon takes his no-favourites stance into the negotiations, it seems set to mean that either both are inside Cabinet or both are outside Cabinet.
Seymour himself clearly realises he has lost any favoured status, even though he brings more MPs to the table.
So Luxon is not the only one trying to take back the words and positions uttered on the campaign.
Not so long ago, Seymour made it clear he would absolutely not sit around a Cabinet table with Peters. He even raised the prospect of sitting on the cross benches as a better alternative.
No more. After the result, Seymour was asked if he had revised this view and could sit around a Cabinet table with Peters now. “Yes, I think that’s possible,” he said.
Reality has bitten.
Peters too is showing signs of a reform. In 2017, when he was kingmaker, he refused to have anything to do with the Greens and would not let Labour tell the Greens what its deal with NZ First was.
This time round, Peters again holds the balance of power, even if it is a moot point, given the cobweb of “ruling out” in play with parties on the left.
While Peters has so far ignored Seymour’s attempts to meet him, he is proposing all three parties getting together to have some discussions.
Luxon will also have to deal with the expectations of his own caucus.
The need to fit two other parties in will mean some MPs who might have expected to be ministers will be left in backbencher-land.
That is not necessarily a bad thing for now: National had a small caucus in the 2020-2023 term. Only a handful have ministerial experience.
There is also a need for experienced people in the Whips’ Office and as select committee chairs.
But those jobs will be cold comfort for MPs who may have assumed they’d be enjoying the ambience of the Crown limos. There will be precious little room for refreshing too.
Eventually, once the negotiations are done and the deals inked, Luxon may well discover they were the easy bit. He has high hopes of running a stable Government, knowing stability will be crucial to getting another term or two.
Then will follow the weekly test of getting the three to agree to whatever is on the Cabinet table, to the details of a Budget, and to trying to keep any disagreements in that Cabinet room, rather than spilling outside.
It is the prospect of that that is giving Labour a little bit of joy as it licks its wounds after an absolute pasting in electorates across the country. All but one of the Māori seats have fallen back to Te Pāti Māori. Many of Labour’s safest seats fell. It’s easy to work out how it lost Auckland. Thank you, Covid and inflation. The harder job that lies ahead is in working out how to get that support back.
However, as Labour goes about that, those who sat around the Cabinet table in the 2017-2020 term, watching as NZ First applied its famous handbrake, will not have much envy for the National-led Cabinet.
Claire Trevett is the Herald’s political editor, based at Parliament in Wellington. She started at the Herald in 2003 and joined the Press Gallery team in 2007. She is a life member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery.
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