By the time you read this, the New Zealand election will be about a week away.

Now I’d like to be able to assure readers that the preponderance of Kiwi voters can all too easily recall the lockdown thuggery of the Jacinda Ardern years and so will be in no hurry to vote to return to a Labour government whose big names were part of that Covid illiberal heavy-handedness (which is a euphemistic way to describe policies that imposed the biggest inroads on our civil liberties in two hundred years, that saw the biggest-ever transfer of wealth from young to old and from poor to rich, that justifiably destroyed trust in our elites, journalists, public health doctors, politicians most notably, and that gave cover for all sorts of free speech-inhibiting moves by government).

I’d like to assure you all of that, but I can’t. And I can’t even don a certain Aussie holier-than-thou smugness and look down condescendingly from this side of the Tasman at our Kiwi cousins. Because the state of Victoria easily surpassed even the brutal lockdown thuggery of the ‘I am the single source of truth’ Jacinda Ardern NZ Labour government. I’ll be blunt. Dan Andrews was worse – democratic world’s worst, in fact. And yet in late 2022 Herr Andrews led Labor to its second-best Victorian election result ever, a landslide victory. That was back in late 2022 when even the fearmongers and peoples whose brains had stopped functioning for a year-and-a-half had to know that Sweden had handled the pandemic better than any other country (just go and look at countries’ excess deaths start of pandemic to today). And yet Victoria’s voters handed the Labor Andrews’ government an increased majority win. You gotta wonder what’s in the water in Victoria. But my point here is that Australians are in no position to get all sanctimoniously smug about the seeming lunacy across the Tasman of New Zealanders opting to vote next week for a Team Labour government, not given what Victoria’s voters were willing to do in 2022.

That said, it is a real possibility that Labour might win in NZ next week. I think the odds are against it, yes. But we’re looking at an election that is far closer than it should be. So why is that?

Well, first off, the NZ National Party (which is the main party of the current centre-right coalition government over there) has been pretty uninspiring in its three-year term. The party’s leader, and current NZ Prime Minister, is Christopher Luxon, a former CEO of Air New Zealand. He brings all the courage and willingness to fight the left that you’d expect from today’s corporate elites – which is to say vanishingly little. He’s better than a Malcolm Turnbull, but not all that much better. And his own party knows he’s a problem. Luxon has survived not one but two party room leadership challenges this year. The first was in April and the second in August. They don’t release the vote tallies but speculation put the latter vote at about 27-22 for Luxon. And he won because the main challengers could not coalesce around an alternative and preferred to keep their own prospects alive by keeping Luxon in office for the time being. That may come back to bite them in the rear ends if Labour wins next week.

The other biggest factor against the current right-of-centre government’s prospects is New Zealand’s truly stupid and daft voting system MMP, which they copied almost verbatim from Germany when they voted for it back in 1993. When I lived in NZ for a decade till 2004, I used to rail against MMP, to no obvious effect. Be clear. As with all things we fallible, limited biological creatures do and design there are never any perfect choices or options available. Hence, all voting systems have flaws and we humans – as with everything else in life – are in the game of picking the least-bad option going. Sure, majoritarian voting systems like Canada’s, Britain’s and the US’s First-Past-the-Post or Australia’s preferential Ranked Choice systems have flaws. But their big virtue is that all the compromises take place before the election and the big tent parties are forced to let the voters choose. By contrast, with all proportional voting systems no party can realistically ever win on its own; the promises and manifestos are effectively meaningless; and the compromises happen after the election and away from any voter oversight.

For NZ that means the three centre-right parties make all sorts of pledges and then, after winning, have to work out some sort of modus vivendi. The big player National Party of PM Luxon tries to run and hide from any culture war issues. Meanwhile, the two little parties of ACT (a mildly libertarian outfit) and NZ First (close to our One Nation) try to get some action and movement on what matters to their voters. Widespread disappointment is a natural result. I suspect most NZ right-of-centre voters would give this Luxon government’s last three years a grade no higher than B- (even with all the grade inflation going around).

But a wholly different problem with NZ’s MMP voting system goes under the name of the ‘overhang’. What’s that you ask? In simple terms if you vote across the Tasman you have two votes. One is for your constituency or electorate MP, much like here. But unlike here you also get a second vote for your preferred party. On the election night you count up the electorate MPs for each party and then see how each party did in the party vote. And that second vote is the one that matters. The little parties tend to win very few electorates. So they get their MPs into Parliament based on what is known as ‘the list’ – a ranked list of candidates drawn up solely by the party leadership (which stinks in itself). Think of the list as how you top-up the total MPs for each party to achieve rough proportionality.

But here’s how you game that. If a political party gets more electorate MPs than it is entitled to from its party vote share, that’s called ‘an overhang’ and those surplus MPs stay in the Parliament. For a while now the NZ left-side of politics has played on the fact that there are a few reserved seats in Parliament for those of Maori descent, another awful DEI-like feature of Kiwi politics. Well, there is a Maori party which wins a lot of these reserved electorate seats. But it is telling its voters to vote Labour for the party vote. See the problem? This has the potential to deliver two or three overhang or extra MPs for the left. And so just a few weeks ago the leader of NZ First counselled conservative voters to respond, voting National in all electorates but NZ First or ACT in their party vote. The right-of-centre ‘overhang’ could in theory be very large indeed.

If you wanted to win the election, if you were a fighter, this is precisely the response you would make to the left. So it goes without saying that Luxon and the Nationals and former PM John Key came out against this reciprocal ploy. ‘Not the done thing, old boy.’

Get ready for a big exodus of Kiwis if Labour wins next week’s elections.