Every week it seems there’s a new political poll. A recent one shows that New Zealand’s main political parties are unliked, unwanted and unloved to pretty much the same degree by all 27 respondents, some of whom admitted later they’d answered kind of truthfully-ish. And it’s probably fair to say that generally speaking politicians are held in much the same regard as used car salesmen, if those used car salesmen had set fire to an orphanage, sent a rude email to Hilary Barry and roasted the last Maui’s Dolphin on a spit.

Hating politicians is a national sport – there are no rules but, and no training is necessary: it’s just a skill we’re all born with. And not just a national sport either – other nations’ politicians are just as hateworthy, and anyone can join in. You don’t even need a passport.

But what if we were to break it down a bit, applying some science? Would we find a politician head and shoulders above – or below – the rest? Let’s hope so, or the previous 200 words will have been a waste of time.

Truth be told, it hasn’t been much of a task for the WWNews researchers. A quick chat with Claude.ai, a few taps on the calculator, and hey presto, we have it.

Without further ado, unless he himself is doing the introductions, the title of NZ’s Most Unwanted MP goes to … Shane Jones!

And here’s for why. In the 2023 General Election, Shane-o stood for NZFirst in the Northland electorate. He didn’t win the seat. He didn’t come second. Shane Jones romped home in third place, receiving 8,143 electorate votes, or about 17.8% of the total. The votes that went to candidates other than Jones amounted to roughly 82.2%. So over 80% of voters in the Northland electorate didn’t want Shane to represent them.
Tough. Because Shane’s also on the list. The List is part of NZ’s electoral system – MMP – which has taken the basic tenets of democracy and put them through a series of equations and algorithms to ensure the end result is nothing remotely democratic. It’s a bit like the Australian system of preferential voting which rewards those who preferred not to study calculus at university level, casting their vote instead according to cards handed out at polling booths.

Under MMP, NZ voters get to vote twice, once for a candidate in their electorate and once for their preferred party. List seats are allocated according to the percentage of votes each party gets. In 2023 NZFirst’s share of the party vote scored them 8 seats in Parliament, one of which went to Shane Jones.

To get those 8 seats, NZFirst’s share of the party votes was around 173,553 of the total. Or 6.09% of the total party vote.

And that means nearly 94% of all those who bothered voting in the 2023 election didn’t want NZFirst or its affable leader Winston Peters anywhere near Parliament buildings.

80% didn’t want Shane, even more didn’t want Shane’s Party. But there he is. Our winner – NZ’s Most Unwanted MP.