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Northcote is a New Zealand parliamentary electorate, returning one Member of Parliament to the House of Representatives of New Zealand. The current MP for Northcote is Jonathan Coleman of the National Party. He has held this position since 2005.
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Population centres
Northcote is based around the suburbs of North Shore City at the northern end of the Auckland Harbour Bridge. Besides the eponymous Northcote, there is Birkenhead, Birkdale and the southern end of Glenfield. It was created ahead of the change to mixed-member proportional (MMP) voting in 1996 by merging the seat of Birkenhead with most of the old Glenfield electorate. A small boundary adjustment was done prior to the 1999 election, but no further boundary adjustments were undertaken in the subsequent redistributions in 2002, 2007, and 2013/14.
Northcote continues the electoral habits of its predecessor seats; Birkenhead was a reasonably safe seat for the National Party, supplying it with Jim McLay, who led the party in the mid-1980s, and remains the only National Party leader to never take his party to an election. In 1987, the seat that would provide National with a leader provided Labour with a gain, before swinging back into the blue column when Labour's fortunes thinned out at the 1990 election. Glenfield also followed this boom and bust model, being held by Labour Party MP Judy Keall through the duration of the fourth Labour government before the National Party landslide in 1990 claimed Keall as one of its victims.
History
The first MP for Northcote was Ian Revell from the National Party, who would rise to become the Deputy Speaker. Revell was caught up in a scandal for misuse of official letterhead and was defeated by Labour's Ann Hartley in New Zealand general election, 1999. Hartley herself was ousted by the seat's present representative, Jonathan Coleman, when National consolidated the centre-right vote in 2005. In the 2008 election Coleman was re-elected in Northcote with a majority of 9,360 votes. He was again successful in the 2011 election, winning by a majority of 9,379 votes. He had a slightly increased majority in the 2014 election.
Members of Parliament
Key
National Labour Alliance
List MPs
Members of Parliament elected from party lists in elections where that person also unsuccessfully contested the Northcote electorate. Unless otherwise stated, all MPs terms began and ended at general elections.
2011 election
Electorate (as at 26 November 2011): 45,675