Election 2023 will go down in New Zealand’s electoral history as one that perhaps offered the greatest hope for more Kiwi-Indian representation in Parliament, and yet left the diaspora high and dry.
More than a dozen candidates of Indian origin were in the fray but only two—Labour’s Priyanca Radhakrishnan and ACT’s Parmjeet Parmar—will be sitting in Parliament, both from the list.
Vote Share
A complex mix of factors decides how candidates perform, but a safe starting point is perhaps looking at the percentage of votes they polled.
National’s Mahesh Muralidhar tops the charts on this count. The tech entrepreneur won nearly 38 per cent of the candidate vote in Auckland Central, where his National party could garner 34 per cent party vote.
The fact he lost to Green Party star Chloe Swarbrick, who also won last election despite a Labour wave, will give Mahesh some solace. But he did have the advantage of contesting from an electorate National held from 2008 to 2020.
Former minister Priyanca Radhakrishnan lost her Maungakiekie seat to National’s Greg Flemming. But if it is any compensation, she did win 35 per cent of the candidate vote when her party could muster only 27 per cent in the electorate. Her plum list placing, of course, gets her to Parliament a third time on the trot.
National’s Ankit Bansal won 35 per cent of the candidate vote in Palmerston North, a seat Labour has held since 1981 but where National candidates have often returned electorate votes of upwards of 40 per cent.
National’s Siva Kilari won more electorate votes than what the party could garner in Manurewa, while his colleagues Navtej Singh Randhawa and Karunanidhi Muthu from Rongotai ended up with fewer electorate votes.
ACT Party’s best performer on that count is Rahul Chopra from Mt Roskill, garnering six per cent each of party and electorate vote. Parmjeet Parmar could garner just 992 candidate votes from Pakuranga, ending up at the bottom of the list, at three per cent candidate vote in an electorate where ACT’s party vote stood at 10 per cent.
At nearly 21 per cent candidate vote, Kharag Singh managed to pull together decent Labour support from Botany, a National stronghold where he was pitted against incoming Prime Minister Chris Luxon.
Loss Margin
The only two candidates that ever came close to winning were Mahesh Muralidhar and Ankit Bansal. Mahesh trailed Chloe Swarbrick till the very end, falling short by just 2,074 candidate votes, while Ankit lost by 2,733 votes.
Some of ACT candidates were among the worst losers on this count, with Himanshu biting the dust by 28,331 votes and Parmjeet behind by 20,223. The Green Party’s Sapna Samant, who was up against Priyanca in Maungakiekie, was rolled over by 24,010 votes.