Sure. I think there's a high level of co-operation amongst parties at the parliamentary level, and that's a very good thing. Some of the hyper-adversarial nature and also the secrecy—“We're in power; we'll hold all information”—has diminished significantly. I'm not going to say it's been eliminated. Pixie dust didn't fall from the sky or anything magical like that, but it certainly has improved the notion of parties being able to work together.
The two major parties broke up a little bit. They became slightly smaller, and people on their right and left broke into new parties, so it kind of revealed the internal coalitions that all parties have to have under first past the post. I think that improves civility because people understand their positions much better.
I think the shake-up in the campaigning sort of got rid of the idea that there were no-go zones in parts of the country, so that if you were from one party there was no point campaigning somewhere else, because even if you had no chance of winning that constituency or that riding, there would still be a significant proportion of citizens there who might give you their party vote, so it made it worthwhile.
I think it has encouraged parties to think much more broadly about how they approach campaigning, and I think that has been a good thing, though hard for the parties. I was in a big party, so I liked the idea that we would win majorities, but until we could win a majority of the vote, I never felt we should get a majority of the seats. That used to be a minority view. It's now a view that I think nearly every politician in New Zealand would hold.