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New Zealand electorates

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In New Zealand, an electorate is a voting district for Parliamentary elections. They are sometimes informally called seats. Historically, all Members of Parliament were directly chosen for office by the voters of an electorate. Today, under the MMP electoral system, 69 of the usually 120 seats in Parliament are filled by electorate races, with the remainder being filled from party lists in order to achieve proportional representation.

Contents

Distribution

Originally, electorates were drawn up based on political and social links, with little consideration for differences in population. Each electorate was allocated a different number of MPs (up to three) in order to balance population differences, but this was only partly successful. Eventually, a new system was introduced — each electorate would elect one MP, and would boundaries would be drawn based on population. However, a special country quota meant that rural seats were allowed to contain fewer people than urban seats, preserving an inequality (and over-representing farmers). The quota persisted until 1945.

Today, electorate boundaries are determined by the Representation Commission. The Commission consists of:

Boundaries are reviewed after each New Zealand Census, which occurs every five years. The South Island is guaranteed to have 16 general seats, with the remainder of voters (North Island and Maori) being divided into electorates of the same population as the South Island ones. Electorates may vary by 5% of the average population size. This has lead to the number of list seats in Parliament to decline as the population is experiencing 'northern drift' (i.e. the population of the North Island, especially around Auckland, is growing faster than that of the South Island).

Special electorates

Over the years, there have been two types of "special" electorates created for a particular community. The first were special goldminers' electorates, created for the benefit of participants in the Otago Goldrush — goldminers did not usually meet the residency and property requirements in the electorate they were currently prospecting in, but were numerous enough to want political representation. These electorates, of which only two were created, did not last long. Much more durable have been the Maori electorates, created to give separate representation to Maori citizens. Although originally intended to be temporary, they came to function as reserved positions for Maori, ensuring that there would always be a Maori voice in Parliament. Until 1996 the number of Maori electorates was fixed at four, significantly under-representing Maori in Parliament. However the introduction of MMP allowed for the seat number to change with the population.

List of electorates

General electorates

Maori electorates

Goldminers' electorates




 





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