Boy New Zealand seems to have by the most BORING politics in the English speaking world - no change from the last election, so swing to the left like we have seen in the UK or Australia or BC, no rise of rightwing populism...what happened? NZ used to have lots of high drama politically
The Nationals are pretty moderate except for being centre-right on economics. Meanwhile their stance on social issues is pretty liberal which lets them grab social liberal votes/stops social liberals from turning out since they don't feel threatened.
NZ did have a populist surge in the 90s with the populist right-wing NZ First and populist left-wing Alliance party(most of their voters eventually shifted to the greens) because of a crap economy since the recession of the early 80s and another in the early 90s.
But the economy has been doing pretty well since the early 2000s due to a export boom to growing Asian economies which made support for populist right and left parties to stagnate as they were in the 90s, winning no more than the 450-500K vote range ever since.
Also lot of unemployed kiwis immigrated elsewhere especially to Oz in the 80's/90's. Which meant less potential populist voters that could of went either NZ First or the left-wing parties.
