Matthew Hooton thinks it is Winston’s turn to shine:

As detailed on the opposite page, Mr Peters has the Greens to thank for once again gifting him ultimate power to decide the next prime minister. If, to use Rob Hosking’s word, the Greens been less kindergartenish earlier this week, it could have been them not Mr Peters currently playing Jacinda Ardern and Bill English off against one another for policy wins.   

The Greens’ decision not to step forward has real consequences, ecologically and socially. Money which Ms Ardern or Mr English might otherwise have been forced to spend on cleaning rivers, battling climate change or feeding hungry children is now more likely to be invested in new indulgences for Baby Boomers.

Leader James Shaw is almost certainly right that he could never have won support for a National-Green coalition from 75% of his party’s mainly swivel-eyed activists. But what does it say about their integrity that they prefer to grant total power to Mr Peters rather than have Ms Shaw so much as send a text message to Mr English asking what might be on offer?

If, from a Green perspective, New Zealand becomes a more xenophobic, more racist and less tolerant place over the next three years, it will be the Greens’ own decisions this week to hand total power to Mr Peters that will be responsible.

Moreover, if Mr Peters’ experience is anything to go by, it could be 21 years before the Greens again have the opportunity to exercise the balance of power themselves.

The Green party is separated into three factions. MPs, activists/Members and voters. There is minimal overlap between those three groups.

Still, Mr Peters may surprise his critics and it is in his interests to do so.

When he reveals his choice for prime minister, the whole fury and might of the party spurned shall be turned on him. If he is to stand up to it, the deal he reaches with Mr English or Ms Ardern – even if it is to sit on the crossbenches – must be comprehensive, robust and based on a genuine commitment by both sides to make it work.

If, instead, the deal is loose, it will presage game playing by less loyal MPs across the parties, drift and decay, and ultimately the premature collapse of the government.

Assuming Mr Peters is serious about all he has said since first rising to prominence in the mid-1980s as a critic of the Lange-Douglas and then Bolger-Richardson reforms, his demand for more activist economic management must involve much more than a further extension of Steven Joyce and Simon Bridges’ MBIE circus and corrupt corporate welfare machine.

There are very good arguments, for example, for the Reserve Bank to focus solely on price stability and even better ones for it to operate completely independently of politicians. Mr Peters must prevail that it is also not unheard of internationally for central banks to have wider goals or to work in closer partnership with their political masters.

Similarly, much greater hurdles for immigrants and investors – even near insurmountable ones in the case of land – are hardly unusual internationally.

Mr Peters’ plan to reinstate a Forestry Service will be mocked as left wing but it is not radically different from a comprehensive proposal put by Graeme Hart to Sir John Key in 2009, facilitated by my firm, to plant one million hectares of marginal land with a mix of native and exotic forest. Both New Zealand’s net carbon emissions and unemployment rate would be lower had Sir John kept his word to Mr Hart to have his government seriously consider it rather than defer to Nick Smith’s hallucinations that emissions trading schemes were set to be adopted globally at that year’s UN climate change conference in Copenhagen.

Mr Peters’ Northport and Marsden Point rail plan, dubbed “Stalinist nonsense” by Road Transport Forum chief executive and former Act MP Ken Shirley, would delight many Aucklanders. But, more importantly for Mr Peters, it is key to unlocking the economic potential of the north.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership’s investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provisions can be seen as overreach by globalisation advocates and, unlike the WTO’s dispute settlement procedures, an affront to sovereign governments, while Mr Peters is surely right to target the UK and other Commonwealth countries for trade deals in the context of Brexit.

A case can be made that after the divisive child discipline and marriage equality debates, a cup of tea on further social reform is in order. While Mr Peters would surely not want to unravel the settlement of historic Treaty of Waitangi claims, he is not wrong that the iwi elite is out of touch with the people it claims to represent and that so-called contemporary Treaty claims could do with a check.

If Mr Peters can finally bear himself to his duties and deliver, then – perhaps not in 1000 years but certainly 100 – historians will still say this was his finest hour.

Winston Peters has everything to gain and everything to lose right now.

If he takes down another third (fourth) term government his brand and legacy will become toxic.

However if he goes with National and offers up bold policy where the National party has none he could do very well.

Winston Peters leading Jacinda Ardern by the nose may be fun for the left wing for a couple of months, but runs the risk of Jacinda Ardern being PM in name only. While she will be having conversations Winston Peters will be a man of action.

Winston needs a legacy…he has to play sensibly.

I feel sorry for Clare Robinson today, she has gone against the left-wing shibboleths that the election was a vote for change and has said otherwise, that the election was for a vote for the status-quo:

Two extra seats felt like a win to many on the left. But Massey University’s Claire Robinson says that historical analysis of prior MMP results suggests this was far from a change election.

Saturday’s final election results were, contrary to how they were received by some, a real blow for Labour. They didn’t pick up the number of special votes they hoped for. They can’t govern alone with the Greens. More importantly, they can’t govern alone with New Zealand First, which Labour would have been holding out hope for. Labour and New Zealand First together have 55 seats. National and ACT have 57 seats.

No wonder Bill English was beaming in the images at his stand up after the announcement of the final result, and Jacinda Ardern was looking grim, flanked by her equally grim looking ‘henchmen’ (her description) Grant Robertson and Kelvin Davis.

National has to only negotiate with NZ First to form the next government. The process is uncomplicated.

Labour has to hold multiple negotiations. Although commentators are treating them as if they are one entity already, Labour and the Greens are not yet a coalition. Labour says it will first negotiate with the Green Party, then with NZ First, and then, presumably, at some stage all three parties will need to come together either physically or virtually to agree on a way forward. This is a complicated process.

Massive error there from Jacinda Ardern, by negotiations with the Green first she is telling Winston he is third cab off the rank.

Jacinda knows this. She must also know that her argument for still being at the negotiating table is baseless. She’s claiming she has the mandate for change on the grounds that “the majority of New Zealanders voted against the status quo”, and ‘the majority of New Zealanders voted for change”.

In reality there has not been one election since MMP was introduced in 1996 where the ‘winning’ major party got over 50% of the party vote (see table below), and with only 36.9% of the party vote, it’s difficult for Labour to argue that they have more of a ‘mandate’ to form the next government than National on 44.4% in 2017. Moreover, at 44.4%, National’s party vote is greater than Labour’s Party Vote in 1999, 2002 and 2005 — three elections where Labour was more than happy to overlook the fact they didn’t have a majority yet still claim they had the ‘mandate’ to lead the next government.

Pesky things called facts always unhinge lefties.

The final 2017 results show Labour attracted 351,649 more voters than in 2014, which is without question an amazing improvement. But this should not be read as a vote for change so much as a return to home base — the precursor to a genuine vote for change, which is expected to come at the next election.

Labour will have picked up votes from the Greens (who dropped by 94,916 votes), NZ First (who dropped by 21,594 votes), the Internet Mana party (who dropped 30,452). Until we see how votes moved in the NZ Election Study, we’d also have to add some Conservative votes. And Labour got a good proportion of the 175,417 new voters who didn’t vote in 2014.

But to be a vote for change Labour would have had to get more votes than National. In fact National got 20,574 more votes in 2017 than it did in 2014. This is not evidence of a widespread vote to change the major party leading the government. This was a vote for the status quo.

This is devastating for Labour. They don’t want to be in opposition another three years. And to be fair we have to see what transpires this week, before writing them out of being able to form a government. But my research over the past 21 years has shown that where there is a genuine mood for change it shows up in the public opinion polls 12-18 months out from the next election, when more respondents start preferring the major opposition party over the government. If Labour does find itself leading the opposition again after this week it needs to focus on getting to this point, and fast.

Poor Clare, she will excommunicated and howled at via Twitter….oh look mad old Darien Fenton is first out the gate.