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Northland is a New Zealand parliamentary electorate, returning one Member of Parliament to the House of Representatives of New Zealand. The electorate was established for the 1996 election. It was represented by National Party MP Mike Sabin until his resignation on 30 January 2015. This forced a by-election in March 2015 which was won by NZ First Party leader Winston Peters.
Contents
Population centres
Northland is the northernmost general electorate of New Zealand. The electorate encompasses the entire Far North District and Kaipara District, and a small rural section of Whangarei District. At the 2008 election, the town of Wellsford became part of Northland due to heavy population growth in the Rodney seat. No boundary adjustments were undertaken in the subsequent 2013/14 redistribution.
History
The Northland electorate was created ahead of the introduction of Mixed Member Proportional voting in 1996. It contains all of the Far North electorate (called Bay of Islands before 1993), and a large section of the old Hobson seat.
Former Bay of Islands and then Far North MP John Carter was elected MP for Northland in 1996, and was returned at every election until the 2008 election. Carter left Parliament in June 2011 to take up a post as New Zealand's High Commissioner to the Cook Islands. His departure did not result in a by-election, as the vacancy occurred within six months of the next general election. In May 2011 Mike Sabin was selected as the National Party candidate to replace Carter. Sabin had a majority of 11,362 and 9,300 votes in 2011 and 2014, respectively. In December 2014 New Zealand media reported that Northland MP Mike Sabin was under investigation by police over an assault complaint. The reports were not confirmed by the New Zealand Police, the Prime Minister or Sabin himself. Sabin resigned from parliament on 30 January 2015 with immediate effect "due to personal issues that were best dealt with outside Parliament." The resignation forced a by-election in the Northland electorate.
The electorate is one where National traditionally performs well; Labour has not won a general electorate north of Wellsford since a one-off victory in Whangarei in 1972. The upper North Island is also a place where New Zealand First has one of its strongest voter bases; in 1996, Ian Peters and Frank Grover of the Alliance beat Labour's candidate into fourth place and nine percent of the vote. Third parties do well in Northland - at the 1960 and 1963 elections, Social Credit candidate Vernon Cracknell came runner up in Hobson, before taking the seat with 48 percent of the vote in 1966. The area had previously been receptive to social credit theory - Harold Rushworth of the credit-influenced Country Party had held Bay of Islands for three terms, from 1928 to 1938.
Members of Parliament
Key
List MPs
Members of Parliament elected from party lists in elections where that person also unsuccessfully contested the Northland electorate. Unless otherwise stated, all MPs terms began and ended at general elections.
1 Grover left the Alliance in 1999 and joined the Christian Heritage Party.
2015 by-election
The following table shows final by-election results:
2011 election
Electorate (as at 26 November 2011): 44,182