Prime Minister Says No To Opportunity

Part One: Impatience

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has ruled out forming the next government working with Opportunity (formerly known as TOP).

This may seem odd to you. Opportunity are not in Parliament. In fact, they have never been in Parliament.

You’d be right. This is the first time that another party has ruled out working with Opportunity - a party so mild-mannered that they replied by saying they’re still happy to work with National once they reconsider. And this comes in the same week at which Winston Peters tells another MP - an MP who has been in the country longer than I have, and of all people, a man consistently praised across the House for his intellect, hard work and contributions - to “go back to your country” - and Luxon refuses to sack him for being a proud-and-out racist. 

The Opportunity announcement is the most significant moment for this election since the bombs started dropping in February. Let’s walk through why.

Our story begins a decade ago, at the feet of Gareth Morgan: entrepreneur, philanthropist, and cat abolitionist.

Gareth is grousing. Politics had grown too political for him: the politicians bicker instead of cooperating and their parties come up with policy based on preprepared ideological programming, not by referring to scientific evidence. His Opportunities Party would change this. They would work with anybody to push his evidence-based policies: reform the tax system through land tax and a universal basic income paid out to all Kiwis over 18, while promoting environmental conservation and socially progressive prison reform and cannabis legalisation.

And then they get 2.4% of the vote. And as you’ll remember from Chapter Eight (unless you're the one Frozen Peaches reader somehow unaware of Why We Vote??), if you can’t clear 5%, you get nothing. 

Gareth goes. A new leader tries in 2020. Don’t the voters see the sense in evidence-based policy? 

1.5%.

New leader. 2023. If you would just for a moment consid-

2.2%. And, no, trying to win an electorate to exploit the coattails loophole didn’t work either.

It turns out that evidence-based policy - however good of a solution it might be to real issues once actually implemented - is a terrible way to solve issues like “voter attention spans” and “electoral competition” and “nobody knows how the hell a land tax works”. The parties in Parliament are there because they’re good at telling voters with busy lives and without a PhD simply and clearly what they stand for and why it’s good. And Opportunity’s failure to ever consistently produce polling north of 3% meant voters facing several choices knew that a vote for Opportunity would not help to seat a single MP in Parliament. It’s tough out there for parties outside Parliament; in fact, Opportunity has been the best-performing of them all by a country mile for the past decade. 

Opportunity have found those polls now - not just one, but a whole rash of them over the past month, enough to convince me that if you held the election today that around 4% of voters would choose Opportunity. Still not enough - but now their new leader, Qiulae Wong, who offers far more relatability than her predecessors, can very reasonably make the case that your vote can help to put Opportunity over the T.O.P. And in a year where the two major parties are at a historic low, neither bloc offers a compelling promise for the next three years, and the two candidates for Prime Minister are deeply unpopular? That case looks damn strong compared to what it’s up against.

That would instantly grant them enormous power - an inconceivable development, given that literally every previous party to enter Parliament in MMP’s history did so by splintering off a party already in Parliament. Even just 5.01% of the vote would guarantee them six MPs. Good enough on its own, having a caucus who can now learn the ropes, access Parliamentary resourcing for research, and get in front of the media. 

But better yet, the odds are high that rebalancing Parliament with six fewer MPs for the other parties and six for Opportunity means that neither bloc would then have a majority of MPs in Parliament. Placing Opportunity as the kingmakers. Both Labour and National would have to come with Opportunity to offer their best pitches, the most policy concessions they could bring themselves to. And Qiulae Wong and her little gaggle would decide our next Prime Minister. I’m cribbing this from the Hui, but there’d be something historically ironic in Winston Peters - the face of dismissing the experts, the master player of politics, he of “two Wongs don’t make a white” fame, who believes no Kiwi born under the red of the Chinese flag or the green of the Mexican can be trusted - having his position as centrist kingmaker finally usurped by a technocratic newcomer.  

And now Luxon has ruled out working with them. At a stroke, Opportunity’s kingmaker powers are stripped from them. They can’t choose between Labour or National anymore. It’s a big if for them to get in, but if they do, the only bloc open to working with them is Labour-led.

So…why did Luxon do this?

Part Two: Spoiled

Luxon has played this story out before. The ending was very different last time.

In 2023, New Zealand First embarked on a well-timed rise in the polls, capturing stray voters from both blocs. If they reentered Parliament, the National-ACT coalition would be forced to stretch to accommodate another partner. National winced, and waited for Winston Peters to please just go away on his own. 

Yeah, so that didn’t happen.

Finally, Chris Bishop put a gun to Luxon’s head and sat him down to record that hostage video. The National leader instructed the voters very clearly that he really, really did not want to work with NZFirst (but he would if he had to), so please don’t vote NZFirst (but if you do we’ll capitulate and give you what you want), and make sure to vote National (which will do equally as much to get Labour out as voting NZFirst). The three years since then have consisted of NZFirst eating National’s breakfast, lunch and dinner.

And NZFirst were and are virulently anti-Labour. Opportunity are a whole different breed. If they get into Parliament, there’s every chance that they’ll go with Labour and end Luxon’s time as Prime Minister. The disagreements extend to policy, where Opportunity’s flagship demands - a land tax, a redressed universal basic income and greater environmental protections for New Zealand’s maritime zone - directly run against the interests of National’s base and beliefs of the National caucus. 

No doubt Simeon Brown and Christopher Luxon’s strategic meetings concerning Opportunity were a lot shorter than Christopher and Chris’s agonised wrangling over what to do about NZFirst. If Opportunity gets into Parliament, they’ll probably go with Labour anyway. (And if they don’t, then the coalition probably wins a majority on its own, so anything to keep Opportunity out of Parliament is in National’s interest.)

Of course, we’re talking about Christopher Luxon here. No matter how decisive and prompt the decision was behind closed doors, in public he mumbled it out ad hoc at the tail end of a press conference about unrelated matters. His office had to later clarify that, yes, this was a definitive ruling out. Doesn’t matter. The voters read the front page headline “Luxon rules out Opportunity”.

What might they make of this?

Part Three: Right Here Right Now

Here’s the conventional wisdom about Opportunity.

Their voters lean to the left. A party built not on the old political tribes but on wonky policy analysis appeals best to the young, well-educated professional demographic. These voters typically choose between the Greens, Labour and the liberal wing of National. 

Now here’s a poll from Talbot Mills.

Let’s break that down.

One fifth of Opportunity’s current support comes from their 2023 voters. But it’s actually National in first place. Fully 40% of Opportunity’s support is from people who put this government into power. That’s 2% of all NZ voters. Luxon telling those voters that you can’t get this government for another term by voting Opportunity forces them to choose: you can either vote for Opportunity but not for this government, or for this government but not for Opportunity. As I’ve discussed before, more than any other party, National is desperate to claw back every party vote they can get, in order to return critical personnel for another three years.  

Yet will the swing back from Opportunity really be that large? I doubt it. There are all kinds of reasons for Opportunity supporters not to mind this rule out. Some will insist he doesn’t mean it and he’ll be made to see the need to cooperate. More than any other party, Opportunity voters are likeliest to be government-agnostic: if your party’s whole message is “we need to move beyond left team and right team and onto policy”, who do you care that makes it into government, so long as you get the policy you want - Opportunity’s? Polling shows 40% of Opportunity’s vote are not committed to either bloc.

And others will have hopped from the government to Opportunity because they’ve soured on the government. 40% of Opportunity voters would prefer to go with Labour.    

National have not been alone in their dilemma. Labour and the Greens were also losing voters to Opportunity. These parties wanted to warn their wavering voters that Opportunity might join the current government rather than change it, without just giving Opportunity more time in the headlines. National’s ruleout means the warning of a National-Opportunity coalition is far less effective to bring those voters back to left bloc parties. 

So Opportunity may lose some pro-government voters - but anti-government voters could more than compensate for that. Will it be enough?

Part Five: After The Dance

If Opportunity fails to clear the MMP threshold, that’s excellent news for National. Most polls where Opportunity misses out on Parliament show the numbers to form a National-ACT-NZF government, with the Labour-Green-TPM bloc losing out. 

If Opportunity breaches the threshold…there is a slim chance that they won’t be kingmakers, that the government will still do well enough to have the numbers on its own.

Opportunity entering Parliament means two things. One: At least six list seats that would have gone to other parties will belong to Opportunity instead. Two: they will almost certainly have won at least a couple % of the vote off of the government parties to get over the line.

I think an Opportunity in Parliament is almost certainly an Opportunity ready to make a king.  

Luxon definitively ruling out a National-Opportunity coalition in no way takes it off the table. Opportunity have said that they’ll talk to the largest party first, and that’ll probably be Labour, but there’s no harm for a party founded on bridging partisan divides to take its time and weigh up the evidence.

Luxon has every incentive to simply break his word, admit that the voters delivered a different outcome than anticipated, and scramble frantically to deliver a coalition that keeps him on as Prime Minister. The alternative is getting exiled to the shadow realm of Opposition, where he’ll surely be overthrown for the combination of electoral defeat, a dismal call on Opportunity and the failure to negotiate, if he doesn’t just resign on the spot.

Luxon is right when he says that his decision should not come as a surprise. There is a chasm between Opportunity’s brand of evidence-based radical centrism, and National’s steady-as-she-goes conservative centrism. I’ve talked about forming a coalition, in the traditional style of politics, but even forging cooperation on the crossbenches, as Opportunity seems to prefer, will be enormously challenging at this rate. 

Is that how politics should be?

Look at Europe. See a continent full of small countries with proportional electoral systems easy to compare to New Zealand. Witness the astonishing gaps between parties who end up working together. The current Dutch government fuses D66, the CDA and the VVD: liberals of a similar demeanour to Opportunity, classic Christian conservatives, and a National-style broad church. Both the Irish and the Germans have seen their two major parties form a grand coalition together (and before the current lot, the German government was the equivalent of a Labour-Green-ACT coalition here).

I’m not going to pretend that these are all the most efficient or popular configurations. I have no desire to ever see a grand coalition in New Zealand. My point is instead that our MMP environment remains immature: that we have not developed a tolerance for ambitious political cooperation that suits particular circumstances. The major parties could get away with that for the first three decades of MMP, where only NZFirst and the Greens registered as consistently significant players, but with the rise of ACT and Opportunity and the decline of the major parties, they cannot play this rule-out game with perfectly palatable minor parties and expect not to get burned. 

There’s an elephant in the parliaments of the European countries with the most tortured governing arrangements. They have significant extremist parties that they are trying to keep out of government. Germany’s centre-left and centre-right are trapped in coalition against Die Linke - heirs to the old East German communists - to their left and the Alternative for Germany - heirs to the older German fascists - to their right. 

This example cuts both ways in a New Zealand context. Currently, our extremist parties command not even 2% of the vote and no power in politics. We have a lot more voters opting for healthy options, and a lot more room to move as it is in exploring unconventional configurations. 

And should that kind of extremism ever catch fire in New Zealand, I’d like us to have gotten some reps under our belt first, working out the kinks not only in expansive coalitions and grand compromises but the simple process of getting to know each other and evolving our underbaked constitutional shorthands. NZFirst has always been a racist party, but their pledge to strip every permanent resident of voting rights has spooked me as to just how far they might ride the global far-right wave. 

Luxon, as per usual, is fighting the last war and focusing on risk. He let the chicken into the coop with NZFirst, the notion goes, and he won’t make that mistake twice. (Even though it’s abundantly obvious that NZFirst are the only thing keeping enough voters in his coalition to get reelected.) NZFirst are snapping up voters and using all that power to bully and undermine their own government, driving towards the past. 

Luxon should look to the future and think about opportunities. Surely a party with the opposite faults - too naïve and willing to cooperate, so earnest in trying new ideas - is just what you’d like in a coalition partner? With ACT’s shift to the populist right, no party is appealing strongly to the D66-esque social liberals. And Luxon may be right to identify that Opportunity in Opposition is too economically left-wing, ambitiously so, to slot in like that…but what about an Opportunity tamed by the compromises of government, shorn of a lot of these ambitions? I could see it. (And if their supporters desert them for this, oh well. Isn’t that an outcome National’s happy with anyway?)

Put aside all my high rhetoric about civic cooperation. Purely from a cynical political perspective, doing everything to woo Opportunity into the tent is National’s best chance to firm up the left and right blocs, in a way enormously favourable to the right. As I’ve expressed before, without NZFirst or another centrist partner, the Labour-Green core of the left did not win a majority of votes once between 1946 and 2020. Wed Opportunity to your side early and the left will be stuck for a generation figuring out how to get back in. Instead, Mistopher Luxon, you’ve placed all your faith in Winston Peters. And you’ve gifted the left a generation of opportunity.