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Four days on from Saturday’s election and the scale and significance of the result is still sinking in. As Jack Vowles explains, unless special votes change the overall outcome on the night, the 2020 election will have seen the greatest net vote shift between parties in a century — more even than the first Labour landslide in 1935.

While some have argued that the single-party majority this gives Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Party is not what MMP was designed to achieve, Richard Shaw argues quite the opposite. In terms of reflecting the popular will and delivering a diverse, representative parliament, this election scores two ticks for proportional representation.

What Labour chooses to do with this extraordinary mandate remains to be seen. But, as David Hall writes, the party will first have to examine its own political soul and decide what it really stands for.

Meanwhile, the World Health Organization has come in for its share of criticism for its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Sir Peter Gluckman, Sir Jim McLay and Alexander Gillespie argue the WHO’s organisational structure to deal with infectious diseases is out of date, and they suggest a new, independent protocol that would deliver information about emergent infectious diseases faster and in a way that is verifiable and not politicised.

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