Talk:List of New Zealand by-elections

Column for reason

It might be interesting to add a column to the table briefly stating the reason for the by-election, ie Death of Norman Kirk, Resignation of Jim Anderton from Labour, etc. --Helenalex (talk) 00:29, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Western Maori Byelection, 1949

I can't find a record of this happening?? Furthermore the date, 29 November 1949, is also the date of the Maori election in the New Zealand general election, 1949. Therefore I think its a false record. Mattlore (talk) 04:57, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes the date given by Wilson's Parliamentary Record & the DNZB website for her becoming a MP ie is 29 Nov the same as the Maori vote in the general election, so not via a by-election; though I will check Henderson's book quoted on Iriaka Ratana first to see what he says. Hugo999 (talk) 12:09, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Some thoughts on by-elections

Please see the discussion on WikiProject_New_Zealand/governments#Some_thoughts_on_by-elections. Schwede66 00:48, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

Subheadings for table of by-elections

I'm proposing to introduce level 3 headings for this article in the table. I've done this for the first three parliaments, so that you can see what it is that I've got in mind. This is based on the premise that the table is getting too long and needs some structure. Parliamentary terms would be the obvious way to do this, in my opinion. What I've done is to list the number of the parliament, and the years in which that parliament was sitting (which is not necessarily the same as election years). I propose that we wikilink the parliamentary term if there's an article for it. If there's not, then I propose that we wikilink the election year instead. That way, we avoid a long list of redlinks from the 3rd parliament onwards.

Feedback is invited. If I don't hear anything, I'll carry on with the remaining parliamentary terms. Obviously, the column widths need to be fixed, rather than left floating.Schwede66 01:47, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

Looks good. My only comment is maybe we shouldn't avoid the redlinks, as per WP:REDLINKS. It might encourage the creation of parliamentary articles? Mattlore (talk) 02:42, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

That's a good point, Matlore. So let's set up all the headings with wikilinking as per the first one, and we'll thus have a lot of redlinks in there. The headings will still be useful, as the years give the context. Thanks. Schwede66 05:50, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

I've done the next iteration. The column width problem is now fixed. The headings have been modified as per Mattlore's suggestion. Note that I have changed one of the column headings from "Election" to "By-election". As a next step, I propose to simplify all the pipes in that column by avoiding the word 'by-election'. So the first entry would be modified from "1854 City of Auckland by-election" to "1854 City of Auckland". Everybody happy? Feel free to chip in with the remaining headings. Schwede66 19:08, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

Looks good :) Mattlore (talk) 03:51, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Hi (belatedly) re the By-elections article changes, a good idea grouping by parliament. Did you know that J. O. Wilson’s New Zealand Parliamentary Record 1840-1984 (1985, 4th edition) has Changes in membership for Elections from 1890 to 1984. Includes the number of byelections – nil for 1963 1981 & 1984 ie 34th, 40th & 41st (overlooking the 1985 Timaru byelection!). He gives 12 byelections during the 11th (1890) parliament. A possible paragraph for each election article from Wilson’s figures is: "At the 1896 general election 3 MPs retired and 17 were defeated. The MPs elected included 12 new MPs and 8 former MPs returning to parliament. There were 7 byelections in the 13th parliament."

I will add articles on some of the MPs/candidates mentioned eg Leonard Harper who resigned from Avon in 1887. He was not dead; and quite a few in the 19c seemed to resign then return! Also John Ollivier a MP and Mayor. Hugo999 (talk) 11:30, 16 May 2010 (UTC)

The proposed sentence would be a good addition. At the Chch library, Wilson is available only in the reference section, i.e. you can't borrow it, which is a pain. If anybody has a spare copy, I'd gladly receive it. Schwede66 16:17, 16 May 2010 (UTC)

Northern Māori by-election, 1943

The date given for the 1943 Northern Māori by-election was wrong and I have removed it. The 24 September date given was that of the Maori election that year. Paraire Karaka Paikea died in April and his son Tapihana Paraire Paikea did win the by-election, but it would have obviously been earlier than September 1943. Schwede66 20:29, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

If the period then was 6 months before the next election for when a byelection was not needed perhaps T P Paikea had to wait for the general election to enter parliament? Wilson shows him as elected on 24.9.43. And Wilson's NZ Parliamentary Record has only 9 by-elections after the 1938 election. Hugo999 (talk) 11:47, 16 May 2010 (UTC)

Second Ballots at By-elections

As well as second ballots at the 1908 & 1911 general elections, 4 second ballots were held at by-elections (Wilson, 1984 page 178). This should be added to the NZ By-elections article, except that adding more references to Wilson (Ref 18) is too complicated: Hugo999 (talk) 11:52, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

• Rangitikei (R W Smith) 23.9.09
• Thames (E H Taylor) 28.1.1909
• Grey (P C Webb) 24.7.1913
• Lyttelton (J McCombs) 16.12.1913

1878 Franklin

I can only see one 1878 by-election for Franklin on 20 May. What happened on 20 Feb? Also, did Larnach resign in 1878? Schwede66 20:11, 15 August 2011 (UTC)

Yes, he resigned when he sailed to London on Govt. business.
Teara has, The Grey Government took office on 15 October 1877, with Larnach holding the key portfolios of Colonial Treasurer and Minister of Public Works. He remained in office until March 1878, when the Government sent him to London to negotiate a £3,000,000 loan. Thames Star, 6 March 1878 & Evening Post, 30 April, 1878 FanN | talk 16:15, 18 September 2011 (UTC)

by-election tables added to parliamentary terms

Hello Fanx, my watchlist is doing overtime, which is great! I see that you've started adding by-election tables to individual parliamentary terms, which is probably a good idea. However, we are thus duplicating information, and if anything needs updating or amending, it needs to be done in two separate spots simultaneously. The average editor wouldn't know about that, of course, so over time the two data sources would show things different to one another. What do you think of doing this via transclusion, so that we've got a one page for the by-elections for each parliamentary term, and we transclude that to the list of by-elections as well as the relevant parliamentary term? The same principle is used for the election results, which are used with the election pages as well as the parliamentary terms. Schwede66 09:44, 22 August 2011 (UTC)

I'm generally in favour of transclusion, although this article gives us some problems. As it is, the whole table takes each colwidth from the longest entry - if this article were split into individual templates for each Parliament it would get very messy with varying width tables, and there'd be a break between each table.
If we were to 'bookend' the separate parliaments' pages template and this whole article with;

{| class=wikitable
|- align=center
!  By-election !! Electorate !! Date !! Incumbent !! Reason !! Winner
|-
| bgcolor=#EEEEEE align=center  colspan=6|

and

|}

That would be followed by a template of the term's by-elections, beginning and ending with |-

===1st Parliament (1853–1855)===
|-
|1854
|Nelson
|19 June
|William Travers
|Resignation
|Samuel Stephens
|-
|1854
|Waimea
|21 June
|William Cautley
|Resignation
|William Travers
|-
|1854
|City of Auckland
|4 August
|Thomas Bartley
|Resignation
|William Brown
|-

There are a couple of approaches I've considered - as in {{MMP election box begin}} and {{NZ election box begin}} etc, where two different applications call up the same dataset - in this case, the same template(s). Say {{NZ by-elections|49}} (use {{ordinal}} ) and for the individual Parliaments' pages {{NZ by-elections per parliament|49}} (which would include header {{NZ by-elections header}} & footer {{end}} ). If this sounds like what we want I'll work something up.
BTW - the ordinal numbering is only envisaged as part of title, nothing fancy about calling up specific data from a list .. my template skills don't stretch that far, although if we add an {{#if: {{{noheader| .. parameter we could turn the header off at each entry. FanN | talk 18:32, 18 September 2011 (UTC)

I've implemented something for the 6th Parliament. Feedback welcome. Schwede66 04:47, 19 March 2012 (UTC)

Missing book ref

I added a Scholefield book which is used in citations but details of the book itself were not present; I'm assuming this is the correct book as it is used in other Wikipedia articles. Adabow (talk) 06:09, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

Good spotting - thanks! Schwede66 09:12, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

By-election article

This article is a recent research paper published on the parliamentary website with a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 New Zealand licence. That means you can use their text without the need to rewrite anything. Just in case somebody is keen to expand the prose of this article. Schwede66 19:48, 8 September 2014 (UTC)