After a devastating collapse in their vote on election night, the Labour Party is examining what went so wrong and who is best to lead them from the opposition benches.

Chris Hipkins on election night, superimposed over the crowd at the Labour headquarters in Lower Hutt.

"People who were used to being Cabinet ministers and making high-level decisions struggle quite a bit with that transition to being a garden-variety MP again," - Sue Moroney

After a devastating collapse in their vote on election night, the Labour Party is examining what went so wrong and who is best to lead them from the opposition benches.

Current and former MPs alike are calling for a wider refocusing on the party's values and relationships to avoid the kind of fracturing that often so plagues parties banished from government.

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Almost two weeks after their drubbing at the polls - which cut their caucus from more than 60 MPs to just 34 and lost them stronghold electorates like Mt Roskill, New Lynn and West Coast-Tasman - emotions in the party are still raw.

Reflection inevitably turns to questions of leadership, and while MPs publicly backed Chris Hipkins to remain in the job for now, Willie Jackson spoke of support from "most" and leadership ambitions from one or two.

Under party rules, the caucus must vote on the leadership within three months of the election.

Political commentator and former Labour candidate Josie Pagani says if Hipkins can return to the instinct he had when he first took over - the bread and butter basics - he'll deserve to take the party to the 2026 election.

"If Chris Hipkins can prove that, he starts from an honest, difficult analysis of what went wrong and why the Labour party lost - which frankly is not the gods, cyclones, external factors, inflation, cost of living and so on, it was the inability of Labour to respond to those things in a way that voters wanted them to."

Read more:

The 'multiple reasons' why Labour lost so badly

Port Waikato by-election: Labour won't stand a candidate in 'unwinnable' by-election

Greens could surpass Labour at next election unless it gets act together - former MP

The Detail: The West Coast's surprising shade of blue

Auckland's Mt Roskill votes for change, now the hard part begins…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details