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Maungakiekie is a New Zealand parliamentary electorate, returning one Member of Parliament to the House of Representatives of New Zealand. The current MP for Maungakiekie is Sam Lotu-Iiga of the National Party. The name is from Maungakiekie / One Tree Hill, a large and symbolically important hill at the western end of the seat; the name denotes the presence of kiekie vines on the hill.
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The core of Maungakiekie is the suburbs of Auckland clustered around the Southern Motorway, and the most southern parts of Auckland City facing the Manukau Harbour. As at 2008, these include Penrose, Panmure, Onehunga and Royal Oak. In character, the seat is a minority-majority seat, with a large Māori, Pacific Island and Asian population. It is also quite a young seat, with 46.8 percent of the seat's residents under the age of thirty.
History
Maungakiekie has existed in various forms since its creation ahead of the introduction of Mixed Member Proportional voting in the 1996 election. It was created from merging most of Onehunga with a large section of Panmure, both of them reasonably safe Labour seats. Its original incarnation included both Onehunga and Otahuhu, though for the nine years from 1996, Onehunga was part of Mount Roskill, and from 2008 onwards, Otahuhu formed the northernmost part of Manukau East. The same boundary changes that took Otahuhu out put Panmure in at the expense of Tāmaki.
Because of the area's seats' tendency to vote Labour, and because Labour suffered its worst result since World War II in 1996, with votes splintering off to both the Alliance and New Zealand First, Onehunga MP Richard Northey found himself ousted from Parliament in 1996 at the hands of then unknown National Party candidate Belinda Vernon. Vernon's own party suffered a dramatic reversal of fortune that started at the 1999 election and her three-year term as MP for Maungakiekie ended in favour of Mark Gosche, who held the seat until 2008, notching up a majority of around 6,500 in the intermediate elections. Sam Lotu-Iiga captured the seat again for National in the large swing against Labour in 2008.
Members of Parliament
Unless otherwise stated, all MPs' terms began and ended at general elections.
Key
National Labour Alliance
List MPs
Members of Parliament elected from party lists in elections where that person also unsuccessfully contested the Maungakiekie electorate. Unless otherwise stated, all MPs terms began and ended at general elections.
2011 election
Electorate (as at 26 November 2011): 46,637