Voters' vengeance

Jack Vowles

The 1990 election produced New Zealand's most dramatic parliamentary transformation for over fifty years. Labour plunged from 56 seats to 29, while National rose from 41 to 67. Rubbing salt into Labour's deep electoral wounds, Jim Anderton, who had left Labour to establish and lead the NewLabour Party, retained the ninety-seventh seat. It was Labour's worst result by far since 1931. Meanwhile a new party, the Greens, emerged as New Zealand's largest and most popular 'third' party. Many people, disappointed and disillusioned with the Labour Government, justified their participation in its defeat as an act of revenge. Yet if Labour lost because voters abandoned it in large numbers, National did not win because it received massive support and its huge parliamentary majority was partly a quirk of New Zealand's first-past-the-post electoral system. This book documents the election in a...

See on goodreads