Northcote (New Zealand electorate)


Northcote is a New Zealand parliamentary electorate, returning one member of parliament to the New Zealand House of Representatives. Currently, the Member for Northcote is Dan Bidois of the National Party, who won the seat at the Northcote by-election.

Population centres

Northcote is based around the suburbs of Auckland's North Shore that are closest to the northern end of the Auckland Harbour Bridge. In addition to the eponymous Northcote, there are Birkenhead, Birkdale, Beach Haven and the southern end of Glenfield. It was created ahead of the change to mixed-member proportional 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, 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.

Members

The first member 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 1999 New Zealand general election. Hartley herself was ousted by the seat's former representative, Jonathan Coleman, when National consolidated the centre-right vote in. In the Coleman was re-elected in Northcote with a majority of 9,360 votes. He was again successful in the, winning by a majority of 9,379 votes. He had a slightly increased majority in the and was re-elected in the. On 22 March 2018, Coleman announced he would resign within weeks, triggering the 2018 Northcote by-election.

Members for Northcote

Key

List members

Members of Parliament elected from party lists in elections where that person also unsuccessfully contested the Northcote electorate. Unless otherwise stated, all members’ terms began and ended at general elections.

Election results

2018 by-election

2017 election

2014 election

2011 election

Electorate : 45,675

2008 election

2005 election

2002 election

1999 election

1996 election

Table footnotes