How diverse is our new parliament? 

The 55th parliament of New Zealand will be the biggest ever. Here’s how the MPs filling its 131 seats compare demographically to the last lot.

What do the 131 members of our 55th parliament look like? While the makeup may change after special votes are counted, as it stands, 75 of our MPs are men and 56 women – that’s 57% male and 43% female. This is pretty similar to how the last parliament looked at the start of the term, when it was a 56:43 split.

Looking at the different parties’ caucuses, National’s is predominantly male at 69%, as are those of its potential coalition partners: 62% male for Act and 75% male for NZ First. Labour’s caucus has slightly more women than men, 53% to 47%, and the Greens are evenly split at eight male and eight female MPs. Opportunity is 71% female and Te Pāti Māori is 60% female.

There are 34 Māori MPs (26%), 10 Asian (7.6%) and seven Pacific MPs (5.3%). This is slightly lower than last time for Māori and Pacific, who made up 27% and 5.7% at the start of the 54th parliament, and higher for Asian, which was 6.6% last time. (If Carlos Cheung manages to overturn Mt Roskill, this will increase further.) There is one Middle Eastern MP and one Latin American MP (National’s Rima Nakhle, who is Lebanese, and the Greens’ Ricardo Menéndez March, who is Mexican), which is unchanged since last time.

Breaking it down to caucuses, Te Pāti Māori’s caucus is, unsurprisingly, 100% Māori, the Greens’ is 50% Māori, NZ First’s is 42% Māori, Act’s is 23%, Labour’s 22% and National’s 10%. Labour has the highest Pacific contingent at 14%, while the Greens and NZ First each have one Pacific MP, which is proportionally 6% and 8%. National, Act and Opportunity have none. The Greens’ three Asian MPs make up 19% of its caucus, while Opportunity is at 14% with its one Asian MP – Qiulae Wong, New Zealand’s first Asian leader of a parliamentary party. Labour has three Asian MPs, making up 8% of its caucus, while Act’s one Asian MP also puts it at 8% proportionally, and National’s sole Asian MP (Mahesh Muralidhar, the first Asian candidate to win an electorate – Tāmaki) equates to 2% of its caucus. 

In terms of sexual identity (which for many people remains private, so this is not a definitive analysis), there are 11 openly queer-identifying MPs in the new parliament, or 8.4% of the 131 members. The queerest caucus is the Greens’ at 31%, followed by Act on 15% and Labour on 11%. As far as we can tell from publicly available information, there are no LGBTQIA+ MPs in the caucuses of National, NZ First or Opportunity (if we're wrong, let us know). 

What about names? There are three MPs called Chris or Christopher (we lost Chris Bishop but gained Labour list MP Chris Flatt), three Davids, three all-new Craigs (Renney of Labour, Pauling of the Greens and Stobo of NZ First), two Michaels and a Mike. There are two Katies and one Catherine, all in National (Nimon and Wedd are joined by new West Coast-Tasman MP Milne), and two brand-new Jessicas (Rowe of National and Hammond of Opportunity). 

There are two first-name Camerons (Brewer and Luxton) and one last-name Cameron (Blair), two last-name Pauls (Matthew and Tamatha) and one first-name Paul (Henry, whose real last name is Hopes). With Mike's departure, there are now just two Davidsons. There’s one Andrew and one Andy, one Matt and one Matthew, two Scotts, two Katies, two Jameses, two Marks and two Tims. 

Four MPs in our new parliament are under 30 – two in the Greens’ caucus (Wellington North MP Tamatha Paul and new list MP Rohan O’Neill-Stevens), one in National (Mt Maunganui MP Tom Rutherford), one in Te Pāti Māori (Hauraki-Waikato MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke) and one in Opportunity (Eden Skipper). There are at least eight MPs, meanwhile, who have reached the age of eligibility for NZ Super (65), and most of them (six, by our count) are in the NZ First caucus.