For my interest

At a candidates meeting this week the ACT Candidate pointed out that no government since the 1951 National Party had ever achieved 50% of the vote. I always thought that statement was slightly misleading as under MMP 45% of the vote should give you a majority as 10% of votes don't count as they are cast towards parties that don't make the 5% threshhold.

But it turns out that I was wrong. Even if MMP was in existance at every election since 1951, only in 1972 did any party achieve half of the 'valid' votes - Labour in 1972 would have been entitled to 60 out of the 120 seats in parliament, still unable to form a Government unless they nominated a Social Credit or National MP as speaker.

I've created a table to show the outcome if each election was MMP. (And all the votes were the same.) It's all hypothetical, for instance Labour would have presumable lead a coalition with Social Credit in the 1950s when National actually governed. How would have voters reacted to that Government?

Abbreviations are:

Nat = Mational
Lab = Labour
SC/D = Social Credit, then Democrats after 1987
Val/Gr = Values, then Greens after 1990
NZP = New Zealand Party
NLP/A = New Labour Party, then Alliance for 1993
NZF = New Zealand First