On Tuesday, the Representation Commission released its proposed changes to electorate boundaries. Joel MacManus takes a closer look at a few electorates where new maps could mean big political changes.

Rongotai

Shifts left

Julie Anne Genter was a surprise winner on election night when she became Rongotai’s first Green MP – and in fact, the first from any party not called Labour. National has never really been a contender in Rongotai – perennial candidate Chris Finlayson famously used to say if he ever won the seat, he would immediately ask for a recount.

Under the new proposed boundaries, Rongotai will take in 11,700 residents from Brooklyn and Mount Cook, which were previously part of Wellington Central. These are leftwing, Green-friendly areas. Out of 3,141 party votes cast in Brooklyn and Mt Cook, the Greens won 38%, Labour 27% and National 20%. The shift includes the polling booth at Massey University in Mount Cook, where the Greens won 65% of the 650 votes cast.

Rongotai was always going to be another showdown between Labour and the Greens, and this boundary change moves the advantage to the Greens.

Wellington Central

Shifts right

Wellington Central was the most left-leaning general electorate in 2023, with the Greens and Labour combining for 62% of the party vote. That’s unlikely to be the case again. The electorate has shrunk to the south, losing the heavily red/green areas of Mount Cook and Brooklyn to Rongotai, and has picked up 21,600 new residents from the former Ōhāriu electorate, mostly from Ngaio, Wadestown and Khandallah. These are some of National’s best-performing areas in Wellington. National won 40% of the 3,607 party votes cast in Khandallah in 2023.

Green MP Tamatha Paul swept home in a landslide despite a three-way race in 2023. She should be favoured to repeat her victory, but National has a real chance of taking the capital seat if there is a split vote on the left.

Kenepuru

New electorate, leans strongly left

Kenepuru is formed roughly 50/50 from the former Ōhāriu electorate and the southern parts of the former Mana electorate. The Ōhāriu part includes Johnsonville, where National won 38% of the 10,631 party votes cast in 2023. However, those voters will be vastly outweighed by the Labour strongholds of Porirua and the surrounding suburbs. In Cannons Creek, Labour won 72% of 1,727 votes cast in 2023, with the Greens 7% and National 8%.

Ōhāriu was a swing electorate where National saw an opportunity to pick up a seat, hence why Nicola Willis switched from Wellington Central and recently opened an electorate office in Johnsonville. The new boundaries have removed that pathway. Don’t be surprised if Willis moves back to Wellington Central in 2026.

Hutt South

Shifts left

Hutt South is the ultimate bellwether seat. The winner of the party vote in Hutt South has also won the nationwide party vote in every election since 1999. Because it’s so susceptible to swings, any small change could make a big difference.

Under the new boundaries, Hutt South will lose some bits of Epuni and Avalon to Remutaka, but gain a net 4,700 residents by expanding to Newlands, a left-leaning area. Of the 2,957 party votes cast in Newlands in 2023, Labour won 35%, with 31% going to National and 17% to the Greens.

Chris Bishop won a 1,332-vote victory in 2023. The new map could make it slightly harder for him to repeat, but it’s still anyone’s game.

Palmerston North

Shifts right

Palmerston North’s electorate seat has been in Labour’s hands since 1978 but isn’t as safe as it may appear. National has won the party vote there several times, including in 2023, and the electorate race is far from a foregone conclusion. Tangi Utikere was re-elected by a healthy margin of 3,037 votes in 2023 – but he was up against a relative unknown in National’s candidate Ankit Bansal. It will be a much closer race in 2026.

Under the new map, Palmerston North swallows an extra 10,000 residents from Rangitīkei, including the true-blue areas of Summerhill, Bunnythorpe and Fitzherbert. Of the 2,417 votes case in Summerhill in 2023, 65% were for the three government coalition parties, while Labour and the Greens combined for just 30%.

The population shift won’t be enough to swing the seat to National automatically, but it will turn Palmerston North from an afterthought to a key race to watch.

Maungakiekie

Shifts left

Maungakiekie will gain 9,600 residents from Panmure (the former Panmure-Ōtāhuhu becomes simply Ōtāhuhu). The results from 2023 suggest those voters lean left. Of the 1,899 votes cast from polling stations in Panmure, Labour won 42%, with National at 29% and the Greens picking up 11%. Meanwhile, Maungakiekie will discard 2,200 residents from the right-leaning Greenlane, which is redrawn into the neighbouring Epsom.

National’s Greg Fleming won Maungakiekie by a healthy margin of 4,607 votes in 2023, but these changes are likely to make it a much tighter race next time.

Auckland Central

Shifts strongly left

Auckland Central absorbs 15,300 residents from Mt Albert, mostly from Grey Lynn, Arch Hill and Western Springs. These are left-leaning areas and are particularly strong for the Greens. In Grey Lynn, there were 4,900 party votes cast in 2023, an almost perfect split between the three largest parties: 1,393 for the Greens, 1,360 for National, and 1,343 for Labour. Meanwhile, 5,900 residents from the light-blue areas of Grafton and Newmarket are rezoned to Epsom.

Chlöe Swarbrick won the electorate vote handily in 2023, though National topped the party vote. Adding these leftwing voters to an area that already favours the Greens all but guarantees Swarbrick’s re-election.

Mount Albert

Shifts right

Mount Albert will lose 15,300 residents of leftwing areas to Auckland Central. The lost residents have been replaced by Balmoral, a larger portion of Sandringham, and, confusingly, Mount Roskill, a large chunk of which will no longer be in the Mount Roskill electorate. This is National territory – the 950 votes cast in Balmoral in 2023 went 42% for National, 20% Green, and 21% Labour.

Mount Albert has long been considered the jewel in Labour’s crown. It was the electorate of Jacinda Ardern and Helen Clark and David Shearer. It’s not looking so safe any more. Helen White eked out an 18-vote victory in 2023 despite a strong race by the Greens’ Ricardo Menéndez March. Unless there are some serious talks of strategic voting in 2026, Mt Albert could be a National pickup.

Mount Roskill

Shifts right

Mount Roskill loses some soft-right areas to Mount Albert but gains 18,900 new residents from New Lynn – a net gain of 4,600 people, mostly coming from the firmly blue area of Blockhouse Bay, where National won 48% of the 4,538 party votes cast in 2023.

Carlos Cheung became the first National MP to hold Mount Roskill after his unexpected victory over Michael Wood in 2023, and this boundary change will help his chance of holding the seat.

Wigram

Shifts right

Wigram will add 11,300 residents from Prebbleton, which was formerly part of Selwyn. It will lose 9,600 residents of Addington and Spreydon to Christchurch Central.

Spreydon is a strong-performing area for Labour, which picked up 35% of the 3,678 party votes case in 2023 compared with 25% for National and 18% for the Greens. Prebbleton, meanwhile, is a stronghold for National, which won 55% of the 2,946 party votes case in 2023.

Megan Woods held the traditional Labour seat in 2023 by an 1,179-vote margin, but it’s likely to be tighter in 2026. Wigram has moved from leaning Labour to being a genuine toss-up.

Christchurch Central

Shifts left

Like Auckland Central and Wellington Central, Christchurch Central is a left-leaning seat, and the new boundary changes shift it further in that direction. The new additions of Addington and Spreydon are reliably leftwing voters, which will bolster Labour and the Greens. Meanwhile, 6,200 residents in Papanui have been bumped to Ilam. Papanui was National’s best-performing area of Christchurch Central, with 38% of 4,160 party votes cast.

The boundary changes should have Labour’s Duncan Webb breathing a sigh of relief – though the Greens could see it as their chance to make a clean sweep of the big city central electorates.

The full details of all the proposed changes, including maps, can be found here.

As hundreds marched to parliament to protest possible restrictions on gender-affirming care for youth, NZ First leader Winston Peters promised his party would continue to fight against the use of puberty blockers.

In his state of the nation speech in Christchurch on Sunday, Winston Peters used the term “woke” about 14 times – “wokeness”, the “woke agenda”, his “war on woke” – in an attempt to draw a line in the sand between a supposed “us” and a supposed “them”. The idea of the woke and the anti-woke is an idea that may also appeal to Peters’ coalition partner David Seymour, who has argued recently that there were two New Zealands, one that could see something going wrong and obsess over it (namely, school lunches) and one that could just get on with life.

Also on Sunday, an hour earlier and some 431km away, hundreds of those who Peters would likely deem most guilty of “woke social engineering” took a hīkoi through Wellington’s city streets to parliament to call for fairer access to puberty blockers. 

It is an issue which, at its core, pertains to ensuring a specific demographic of children have access to a specific medication. As later emphasised by Peters, NZ First remain committed to “fighting against the use of puberty blockers for children”.

Being able to receive healthcare that is timely and personalised is an issue most New Zealanders would agree is integral to a meaningful experience of life. Add “gender-affirming” before healthcare, and perceptions begin to tip over from healthcare that is “common sense”, to healthcare that is “woke”.

Alice, from hīkoi organiser Queer Endurance in Defiance, told the crowd in Wellington it took two and a half years from the time she was first referred to a doctor for hormone replacement therapy (HRT) to the time when she collected her first dose. “As those days ticked by, my body irreversibly and agonisingly changed further and further away from how I knew I needed it to be,” she said.

When she was finally able to access her medication, Alice said her endocrinologist prescribed her testosterone blocker at a dose eight times too high, and her oestrogen dose four times too low. She stayed on these “dangerously wrong levels” for more than a year, which has caused permanent liver damage and stunted her feminising development, she said, adding that she believed this amounted to medical malpractice. “I know from discussions with my peers that my experiences are far from unique, especially outside of the main centres,” said Alice.

The hīkoi was organised in response to a repeatedly delayed Ministry of Health report into the “safety and long-term impacts” of puberty blockers, released in November 2024. The report, ordered by the government, found that evidence of possible benefits or risks to treating gender dysphoria in young people with puberty blockers was limited.

It recommended puberty blockers be prescribed only by clinicians belonging to “an interprofessional team offering a full range of supports to young people presenting with gender identity issues”. Alice told the hīkoi she believed this would look like “the same interdisciplinary team framework that caused me all of these problems”.

A public consultation on whether additional “safety measures” should be put on puberty blockers closed on January 20. While prime minister Christopher Luxon has said little on the topic, his coalition partners have made their stances more clear. The Act Party supported the report’s advice on implementing restrictions, with minister for children Karen Chhour citing international concern around the safety of puberty blockers. “We should support young people to love themselves, not change themselves with experimental medication,” a statement from Chhour read, a position that conflicts with a sentiment chanted throughout the hīkoi: “We don’t need to live a lie to keep ourselves alive.”

Act has been sceptical of puberty blockers in the past, with David Seymour once criticising comments from then Labour health minister Kris Faafoi suggesting parents should not be able to deny their children access to puberty blockers. “The terrifying thing is, these people are making laws that affect our everyday lives,” a 2022 press release from Seymour read.

 NZ First, meanwhile, had enshrined in its coalition agreement with National a promise to recognise the party’s policy against “non-biological women” competing against “biological women” in sport. As of June 2024, demands for Sports NZ to rewrite its transgender policy appeared to have been shelved, though Peters briefly stepped back into the ring when he falsely claimed Olympian Imane Khelif had “failed a gender test” during the 2024 Olympics.

In May 2024, meanwhile, Peters proposed a law to designate all new and publicly accessible toilets male, female or unisex,  and make it illegal to use a toilet not designated for a person’s gender. This led Labour leader Chris Hipkins to tell media the country had “bigger issues to worry about than Peters’ homophobia or transphobia.”

Had Peters been outside his workplace on Sunday, he would have heard the experiences of young people saying they had been stripped of a medication integral to their experience of life, leading to low self-worth, self-harm, eating disorders, exposure to hatred and suicide rates far higher than those of their cis-gendered peers. He would have also heard that many trans children were already facing significant barriers to puberty blocker access.

Perhaps Peters’ response to them would have echoed the sentiment he shared in Christchurch: “Do you want to be part of the solution or do you want to remain part of the problem? If their choice is the latter – to be part of the problem – then our response is ‘get out of the way’.”