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Port Hills is a parliamentary electorate of New Zealand created for the 2008 general election. Ruth Dyson of the Labour Party had previously held the Banks Peninsula electorate since the 1999 election that was largely replaced by Port Hills, and Dyson is to this day the area's representative. The Port Hills electorate is mostly urban, and lost the more rural Banks Peninsula areas of the old electorate to the Selwyn electorate that was also formed for the 2008 election.
Contents
Population centres
Port Hills was created after a review of electoral boundaries conducted in the wake of the 2006 census of population and dwellings. The bulk of Port Hills comes from the old Banks Peninsula electorate, including the suburbs of Opawa and Woolston, the suburban areas around the Cashmere Hills, and the towns on the north coast of Lyttelton Harbour. The south Christchurch suburbs of Bromley and Sydenham have been added from Christchurch East and Wigram, respectively. Most of the electorate is urban.
The following suburbs, in alphabetical order, are at least partially located in the electorate: Balmoral Hill, Beckenham, Bromley, Cashmere, Cass Bay, Clifton, Corsair Bay, Ferrymead, Governors Bay, Heathcote Valley, Hillsborough, Huntsbury, Linwood, Lyttelton, Moncks Bay, Moncks Spur, Mount Pleasant, Murray Aynsley Hill, Opawa, Rapaki, Redcliffs, Richmond Hill, Scarborough, St Andrews Hill, St Martins, Sumner, Sydenham, Taylors Mistake, Waltham, and Woolston.
Port Hills was one of the electorates worst affected by the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes and suffered minor population loss as a result. The 2013 redistribution has resulted in the electorate losing the areas around Bromley and Sydenham but regaining Halswell back from Selwyn.
History
Because the new suburbs are strong Labour-voting areas, Banks Peninsula MP Ruth Dyson retained the electorate despite a nationwide swing to the National Party in 2008. This is also one of the electorates which elected a Labour MP but where the National Party won the party vote. National's candidate in 2008 was Terry Heffernan (1952–2010), who at that time was already weakened by cancer.
In the 2011 election, Dyson contested the electorate against David Carter. Dyson and Carter had contested before; in 1993, Dyson was successful in the Lyttelton electorate, but in 1996 in Banks Peninsula, Carter had the upper hand. In 1999, 2002, and 2005, Dyson was always in first place, and she was again successful in 2011.
In the 2014 election, the National Party put up Nuk Korako against Dyson; Carter had in the meantime been elected Speaker of the House of Representatives and as such, was not contesting an electorate any longer. Based on preliminary counts, Dyson has a majority of 1,865 votes over Korako.
Members of Parliament
Key
Labour National NZ First Green
2011 election
Electorate (as at 26 November 2011): 43,511