Former National president urges caucus to reconnect with voters

Former National Party president Sue Wood has written an open letter urging the party's caucus to reconnect with voters after what the letter describes as a "lacklustre" campaign.

Wood was National's president from 1982 to 1986, a period when Robert Muldoon was the party's leader. She was the first woman and the youngest person to hold the role. Radio New Zealand reported her letter.

A caucus is the group of a party's MPs in Parliament. National's caucus is made up entirely of electorate MPs, meaning people who won a seat in their own local electorate. It has no list MPs, the members who enter Parliament from a party's ranked list, based on how many votes the party gets nationwide.

National is the largest party in Parliament, with 42 seats. However, it cannot bring in any list MPs because its party vote share was low. Under New Zealand's mixed-member proportional (MMP) system, the party vote decides how many seats each party gets overall, so a party with a low share has little or no room for list MPs.

Wood said National's electorate MPs had outperformed the party vote and had succeeded despite the party's nationwide campaign.

Vanessa Weenink, the outgoing National MP for Banks Peninsula, said the party had pulled too far to the right.