A party that has never held a seat in Parliament is now in a position to decide who runs the country. The RNZ-Reid Research poll released on Sunday morning puts the Opportunity Party on 5.3 percent, over the threshold for the first time in this poll series, and leaves neither the government nor the opposition able to form a majority without it.
On those numbers RNZ projects the right bloc taking 59 seats and the left bloc 55. National would hold 35 seats, New Zealand First 15 and ACT 9. Labour would hold 39, the Greens 12 and Te Pāti Māori 4. The Opportunity Party’s six seats would be the difference either way, which is a remarkable position for a party that polled well under 2 percent for most of the past decade.
The projections assume no overhang seats. If National won more than 35 electorate seats, or Te Pāti Māori won more than four, the maths in the House would shift again.
Opportunity leader Qiulae Wong told RNZ the party’s rise reflects people looking past the two big parties for a plan. “We’re providing an alternative narrative around what that could be, and I think New Zealanders are really, really ready for that. So I think that’s where we’re seeing interest grow in Opportunity,” she said.
Wong said the support was coming from voters on both the traditional left and right, and she was not interested in being sorted into a bloc before anyone had voted. “I don’t think it’s helpful for us to try and play into the left-right blocs. That’s what we’re trying to move away from. We’ve said that we’ll set out clear bottom lines, so that will give those major parties an indication of how we’ll approach negotiations. Then it’s really up to them. Once we see how the votes fall, how they want to respond to that.”
National has already ruled out working with the party. Campaign chair Simeon Brown repeated that position to RNZ and pointed at the party’s tax policy. “We’re not going to be doing a deal with Opportunity. They want to put a land tax on every single New Zealander.” Labour has not ruled the party out, but leader Chris Hipkins said no arrangement would be made before election day. “We don’t do any deals pre-election,” he said. “My view is that voters get the chance to have their say first, and then we sit down and we talk to other parties after the election, depending on what the voters dish up.”
ACT leader David Seymour was unconvinced the numbers will hold once the newcomer gets a proper going over. “They finally come under some scrutiny and basically abandon three of their key policies, under scrutiny, in a couple of weeks. I think that people are starting to look harder at them and seeing less and less as they look harder,” he said. Wong said scrutiny was fair enough. “We definitely welcome that. I think for us, we maintain our integrity, we answer questions honestly. We are a party that follows evidence and data, and so we will always engage in conversations in that way.”
For the two big parties, the poll is grim reading in different ways. Labour dropped 1.8 points to 32.2 percent, its lowest result in this series since the 2023 election, even though National spent recent weeks consumed by its own internal trouble. National edged up 0.4 points to 29.1 percent, a number that would once have been treated as a crisis. RNZ political editor Jo Moir wrote that “in normal times, National would be panic-stations after a sub-30 percent poll, with no path to power, and a leader who’s never been less popular”, but that the party would have braced for worse.
New Zealand First is on 11.9 percent, up 0.4 points. The Green Party is on 10.2 percent, down 0.1. ACT is on 7.7 percent, also down 0.1. Te Pāti Māori is on 3 percent, up 0.7 points, though the party has told supporters it is chasing candidate votes in the seven Māori seats rather than party votes. Co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer said its result would be judged elsewhere. “It’s great to have that growing support, but our success is going to be measured by the Māori seats and the influence we can have on on being able to change this government.”
Green MP Ricardo Menéndez March said his party was not counting on anyone else to change the government. “The Opportunity Party is relying on being able to potentially keep Luxon in power, which is something we’re actively fighting against. And this is why we’ll just make sure that we have the biggest vote available to us, so that we actually can secure a change of government and a change of direction.”
Both main leaders lost ground personally. Christopher Luxon recorded his lowest approval rating to date, with 30.3 percent of respondents saying he is performing well as prime minister against 53.2 percent who think he is performing poorly, a net rating of minus 22.9. Hipkins went negative for the first time as Labour leader at minus 3.8, with 34.4 percent saying he is doing well and 38.2 percent saying he is not. On preferred prime minister Hipkins leads on 21.3 percent, down 2.6 points, ahead of Luxon on 19.9 percent. Winston Peters is third on 11.1 percent, Chlöe Swarbrick fourth on 7.4 percent and David Seymour fifth on 6.2 percent.
The mood question was the bluntest of the lot. Asked whether the country is heading in the right direction, 30.8 percent said yes and 51.8 percent said no, a net score of minus 21 against minus 11.8 in July.
The bigger pattern is the shrinking of the two big parties. National and Labour’s combined vote came in at 61.3 percent, down from 62.7 percent last month, while the minor parties are now pushing 40 percent between them and the undecided group has fallen below 5 percent. That is the same drift towards multi-party government that has reshaped politics across much of Europe, and it points to a longer and more complicated set of negotiations after the votes are counted.
The poll surveyed 1000 people through online interviews between 14 and 21 August, using quota sampling and weighting for age, gender and geography, with a maximum margin of error of 3.1 percent at a 95 percent confidence level. Hipkins dismissed National’s tax attack as a “scare campaign” and said voters would work it out. “They can’t campaign on their track record because their track record is so abysmal. So if their strategy for getting re-elected is just to make up lies about the opposition, I think that people will soon see through that.” Brown said tax would decide the election. “What this poll shows is that as New Zealanders realise that Labour and their mates are intent on increasing taxes, they are becoming more and more concerned about that agenda.”
New Zealanders go to the polls on Saturday 7 November, with voting places opening on 26 October and enrolment closing at midnight on 25 October. If you are still working out where you sit, our voting tool matches your views against the parties’ policies, and the NZ Election Sidekick tracks the polls as they come in.
Do you think a small party should be able to decide the next government, or is that MMP working exactly as intended? Have your say in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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