A visual history of the NZ parliament – 2026 edition
A visualisation by Chris McDowall and Tim Denee.
The story of our House of Representatives in one epic, coruscating image.
In 2017, the Spinoff published a towering chart. Data visualisation genius Chris McDowall had spent several months down a rabbit hole collecting the data on the composition of the New Zealand parliament over time.
Chris and his collaborator, the designer Tim Denee, created a long vertical image – a steam graph, technically – to express that history.
They updated it after the 2020 election, and today, with the preliminary results of the 2026 election now in, Chris and Tim (who together created the masterpiece We Are Here: An Atlas of Aotearoa) have gone and done it again.
We start in 1853, with the formation of New Zealand’s first national parliament. Colour appears as political parties in the form we’d recognise them emerge, with the Liberal Party, an ancestor of today’s National Party, setting the pace. The width of a colour band reflects the party’s number of MPs.
Keep scrolling to see the change in the party mix as well as the size of the House of Representatives. (The upper house, which abolished itself in 1953, is not included here.)
We see the emergence of National and Labour as the dominant counterweights, interrupted by just the tiniest slivers of Social Credit across more than 40 years – a duopoly built on the first-past-the-post electoral system.
The change to that system in 1996, with the birth of MMP, is clear to see. As is the latest evolution, with the prospect of a house bloated to a furniture-challenging 131 seats, and Labour and National together diminished in a way they have not been for, by some measures, 80 years. A tiny wedge of teal, for the Opportunity Party, is there right at the foot of the chart.
The question left at the end of it all is whether that diffusion of the colour palette is an ongoing pattern or an aberration.
Toby Manhire
Toby Manhire is editor-at-large at The Spinoff. He loves to cast a pod, whether it's Gone By Lunchtime, At Large or Juggernaut. He is a former editor of The Spinoff and has worked as a journalist in NZ and the UK since the last millennium.
