National leader Judith Collins has suggested the party’s rout in rural areas may be blamed on voters backing Labour in order to keep the Green Party from power.

The party’s loss on Saturday included huge falls in rural areas that traditionally back National.

Much of this vote went to ACT, but much also went to Labour. Parts of rural Canterbury saw a swing of between 35 and 45 per cent to Labour as it won the party vote in every electorate in the South Island. National managed only 36.8 per cent of the party vote in usually true-blue Southland, to Labour’s 38.5 per cent, with ACT picking up 12 per cent and the Greens 4.9 per cent.

In the same seat at the last election, National won 59 per cent of the party vote to Labour’s 24.1 per cent.

Labour has won 64 seats, enough to govern without the help of the Greens – although leader Jacinda Ardern is still holding negotiations with the party to see if any cooperation is possible.

Collins, speaking to media after her first post-election caucus meeting, in which it farewelled 22 MPs, said she believed some National voters had backed Labour in order to keep the Green Party from being needed in Government.

“We’ve certainly heard from some media who have asked, and some parts of the farming communities, that they voted Labour because they wanted to stop the Greens,” Collins said.

There has been suggestions from Federated Farmers presidents around the country this happened, but there is no hard evidence yet that this is the case.

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For it to explain the wider swing it would need to be one of the largest cases of strategic voting in history, and one that happened against the explicit wishes of the National Party.

 Collins said this kind of thing would become more obvious in the party’s internal review of what went wrong in the election, National’s second-worst result in history.

Asked if her attack on the Green Party’s wealth tax policy in the final weeks of the campaign might have contributed to conservative voters opting for Labour to keep the Greens from power, Collins said that was “certainly something the review can look at”.

“I think the main thing is that nobody wanted the Greens in Government,” she said.

The Green Party increased its share of the vote between 2017 and 2020 and won the seat of Auckland Central from National.

Outgoing MPs were forthright when asked about the defeat on their way into Parliament.

Dan Bidois, who lost in Northcote, said the entire caucus needed to own the loss – including the leader.

Lawrence Yule, who lost in Tukituki, said there were factors outside of the party’s control that contributed – but also factors inside its control, like the hole in its fiscal plan.

Many were furious about the leak of an email penned by Denise Lee in the midst of the campaign which complained of a terrible culture within the party.

Lee herself told reporters she backed Collins at the press conference.

Asked about the Green Party theory on Tuesday, Ardern said: “there’s a range of reasons why people would have chosen to vote for Labour at this election”.

“Many people voted us in to make sure we rolled out that plan on Covid-19 recovery and we will be very clear about that.”

Green Party co-leader James Shaw simply responded “there is certainly a lot of speculation” when asked about the theory.

The exact reason why so many rural areas back Labour is not likely to be fully explained until the post-election New Zealand Election Study is completed, a massive survey of voters that explores their intentions when voting.

Labour’s agriculture minister Damien O’Connor said the Labour vote in the areas was an endorsement of the party itself.

“It's amazing, I think we saw that in 1993 and not since then have we had so many of those provincial seats. It’s an indication that underlying it always is a good understanding and appreciation of what Labour can do,” O’Connor said.

He also said the apparent campaigns against water and climate policy in rural New Zealand had clearly been overstated.

“Look, they were beaten up for political reasons and that’s a bit unfortunate because rural New Zealand feels a bit battered and the reality is that everyone wants the same thing – the farmers will say that – it's just a question of how far and how fast.”