TOP's Dead, Maybe. TOP's Dead.

A week after the Opportunities Party a.k.a. TOP announced their new flagship policy charcuterie board, I am here to report upon the matter. In this delay, I am blameless. First, I lost four wisdom teeth. Second, after an undeniably rewarding weekend of debating judging, I was left feeling like I had lost four Wisdom. This can be apportioned between the general mental exertion and, thirdly, the Mariamas Trench of Davidson discourse about what is prim and proper for a minister to say after being struck by a motorcycle. I am here, and we can discuss the state of TOP.

It’s bad.

The new policy announcement is a horrific blunder - unlikely to get much attention and therefore to have much of an impact by dint of their size, but here we are nonetheless. To even make a mistake of this scale shows why they are unfit to win seats: and yes, all parties set out…suboptimal policies sometimes, but I am inclined to be harsher on a party self-obsessed with a supposed evidence-first, politics-last basis.

This is policy that appears to be crafted not to govern well, but to be elected; if that is so then they’re still doing a terrible job. If, by some miracle, they get in despite this albatross around their necks, they won’t get it as policy; like most minor party policies and some from the majors, it is too ambitious to survive coalition negotiations in an MMP environment, although parts might be cribbed (I’ll identify which parties may favour which later in the piece).

If any component of this is implemented in the end, then that is an egregious waste of government’s capacity to get things done, already stretched on a thin bandwidth between the disruption of recent years, the incompetence at a central level and revolt in many local areas.

TOP will die at this election. They will deserve that fate. I hope the energy for change, from a two-party dominated system and a default to the same-old same-old, stays alive. Whatever playfully sharp invective the semi-anonymity of the written word draws out of me, I bear no will against a party full of people who are genuinely interested in making New Zealanders’ lives better, and thinking deeply and broadly about how to reshape what is not working into what will. But this is not it.

I really don’t like this policy. Let’s discuss.

TOP’s announcement carries two main components: the National Civics Service, which is more of a holistic civics education, and the Teal Card, which is for residents and citizens from ages 18 to 30, and subsidises a bunch of things it’s good to be able to afford. The National Civic Service is worth dispensing with first, as the lesser component with a distinct character all of its own.

This itself comes with one too many parts, offering up a $5,000 payout to young people if they complete their “service” before the age of 23. Financing to set up new adults from the start is a fine goal, though of course one worries about whether it will be spent well - both on a micro level, which presumably the financial education included in the service is supposed to mollify, and on a macro level; does a high-inflation, low-unemployment economy really need to stuff our pockets to drag us out to camp right now?

More concerning is the universalist philosophy on display here. I’ll tackle it more later - it’s a favourite theme of TOP’s, what with their support for a UBI - but if you like that, then you should acknowledge that they’re already off to a bad start. Proferring an opt-in, $5,000 payment undermines the concept of universality. The opt-in creates inequality between those who claim and those who don’t, and whatever judgements you want to exercise on those who don’t bother to do NCS and take the easy money for five straight years, this is an actual economic fact you will have to contend with.

More pressingly, this creates incentives for a government, particularly if TOP are in a coalition with National and ACT, to try to discourage people from applying or disqualify their reward for participating, by the same logic with which WINZ hunts for benefit fraud: it saves the government money and creates the perception they are fighting against handouts for the lazy.

The tradeoff of $5,000 going to each participant becomes yet more distressing when TOP openly reveal NCS itself is going to cost $5,000 per person - at which point you might start to ask why not just give them the whole bag? The pinnacle of this farce is upon the revelation that the entire NCS course is just two weeks.

Two weeks.

Two weeks?!

Forget about any goal that hypothetical national service could possibly achieve, with that time period. As they cite with examples like the Student Volunteer Army (an excellent organisation about volunteering for others, not bettering yourself) and Outward Bound (a great opportunity necessarily utilised by a self-selected minority of youth trying the hardest), some people do have life-changing experiences from a couple weeks of effort alongside their peers.

Not when it’s everybody just punching the clock for what amounts to $350 a day - double what you’d make for actual work on the minimum wage. Not when you're going to be splitting the difference between outdoorsy activities that challenge a lot of people and put them under pressure - a meritorious objective not often appreciated by those under the gun - and the urban stick-pointing of civics, finance, and driving lessons.

TOP very much come off as the latter: a grousing teacher standing over your shoulder, saying what’s good for you from the comfort of a lecture theatre or a high-up office, out of touch with reality. Having to parent adults is never pleasant or easy. Having to help run MIQ did such a number on the army that attrition soared, and the mere prospect of boot camps kicked up a fuss. Now imagine boot camps for everybody, without even the reward of seeing any potential transformation in the younger generation. Neither does this look like a happy match for young people; besides what we all know about how many people hated school camp (let alone being told how to do their taxes or memorise the Road Code),

In this intermission between National Civics Service folding and me calling the Teal Card’s bluff, I’d just like to stand up from my desk, stretch (as you should too), and share an important message. I find camping, kayaking, orienteering, and all manner of such activities to be deeply rewarding. While they undoubtedly tire you out and leave you with stressful questions like “is that a possum in the branches above me?” and “will any cars run over my sleeping bag in the night?”, they are also well worth going out and engaging with, for the sake of your health, your appreciation of our beautiful country, and life experiences not nearly everybody gets to access. Safely, please; Frozen Peaches is not liable for anybody getting lost in the woods, or any glam rock ballads that may result. With that, it’s time to return to the table. Teal me in.

Up front: what’s inexplicable is that despite being framed as teal, this barely is. “Teal” is most commonly associated in New Zealand politics with blue-green environmentalism, and I intend to discuss that would-be “Teal Deal” some other time. For now, note that TOP’s total spend on everything I talk about in this article is projected to be $1.5 billion (half of NZFirst’s Provincial Growth Fund alone!), of which just $220 million is going towards the climate.

To be fair, over double the Green Investment Fund’s initial seed capital, of which half has gone towards electrifying buses. To be accurate and so not unfair, but also not kind, TOP would instead rather provide a $1,500 credit to...afford bikes, e-bikes and e-scooters. Is more people biking a good thing? Yes. Is a key transport cost for some young people replacing their stolen bike? Yes. Do I think the affordability crisis and the climate crisis alike hinge on whether uni students can keep swiping, in an imitation of their dating lives, to bowl over the elderly on Limes, or if they’re forced like miserable sods to pay to get on an electric bus and probably hop on the free wifi while they’re at it? No.

From a strategic angle of getting elected, I do think this is an attractive, easy-to-understand nice-to-have. The other half of this is free public transport, which sets a lot of hearts aflutter, although it’s worth noting that both studies from countries like Luxembourg (who have made public transport free and should theoretically be car-free paradises) and all of our feedback persistently shows that the biggest impediment to public transit is not price: it’s reliability.

It’s annoying to occasionally miss out on the bus and have to figure out a plan-B like Uber if you haven’t got any money on your card, but what consistently repels people about public transport, and keeps many of them off of it and in cars, is just not having a bus show up when you’re already late for work or in the dark alone, or struggling to squeeze in with the rest of the sardines every day every week. I would advise every party to kindly forget about the shiny distraction of free public transport and invest in more buses, more drivers, more lanes, and do something about light rail or get off the pot.

Making this your only climate policy seriously cuts into your ability to promote your distinctive brand. TOP is indeed the party for young, well-educated people whose top priorities tend to be issues like the climate. I take one look at this and think that TOP is what haters call blue-greens: content to trade in on the brand without caring about the substance. Maybe they’ll release more climate-related policy closer to the election, and their website has some vague and generally already agreed-upon priorities alongside a link to...learn about their tax plans, but they’ve blown their one chance to affix the teal label to a serious claim to be a teal party and ask voters to put their mouth ahead of where their money is, after a series of horror years for the Greens (2017, 2020 and 2022).

The best I can say for this is that, while I don’t know what the stats or demographics look like, subsidising bikes probably isn’t the worst case of universality - while subtypes like mountain bikes surely skew towards higher-income buyers, general-purpose A-to-Bikes are useful and accessible anywhere the ground’s flat enough to make them work, and so I as a Cantabrian feel a dutiful attachment to these as a nice thing Wellington can’t have.

What sparks the most incredulity about this “climate policy” is that the source of funding is…the Climate Emergency Response Fund. Clearly, what the motive for this is remains between TOP and Gaia, because they haven’t seen the need to let the rest of us in on why in the world they’ll defund the climate response just so I can go get hit by a car, then, worse, be posthumously defamed for daring to be a bloody cyclist.

Onto the core of the Teal Card: free GP visits, primary dental, annual eye checks and mental healthcare. Hooray! Those are wonderful goals to provide to people in need. I don’t have much to complain about with the value of these services, and in fairness they make up over a third of the overall spend. The first problem is what we just discussed under transport: while cost is a more major barrier to access here, so is actually having reasonable waiting times or, in many cases, literally just having a single medical professional in your area able to provide a given need.

The second is that they are offering five sessions for mental health care a year. Besides the issue stated immediately prior, this is, again, laughable. It’s good to have for those who need to be able to check in sometimes, but for those who aren’t the most severely in need, yet still have quite serious needs (e.g do not require institutionalisation but are persistently troubled by trauma or mental illness), even five sessions with the same therapist will break off your progress just as it’s really getting started, and you’ll still struggle overall if you pay to continue; you’ve got no chance if you can’t see the same one the whole time.

The third is universality: the concept that you should slosh the same amount of money onto everybody (such as with a UBI), rather than means-testing or otherwise regulating access to those facing financial hardship. These regulations are of course frequently cumbersome, degrading, and otherwise problematic, but I weigh that as a necessary evil against the alternative. If you are on the right, you should not tolerate taxpayer dollars being wasted and deeply inefficient spending. If you are on the left, you should be equally incensed by wealth being transferred to the well-off, whether it is from tax cuts or spending increases.

Some on the right are happy to in the same breath critique spending they don’t like while pocketing that which benefits them. It’s not a morally bankrupt position to grab first-years free or whatever, but it is obviously logically indefensible on a macro scale. Some on the left dream of a social democratic utopia where everybody benefitting from public services draws them into maintaining them for the good of all. Just look at the landslide left-wing wins we see every three years as the elderly turn out in droves to reward governments for providing superannuation. Yeah, right.

It’s not real and it is morally bankrupt to take working people’s tax dollars and bribe rich boomers (or, in this case, their kids and grandkids) to try to win their vote. Labour did enormously well at winning less left-wing and older voters last election on the back of oft-forgotten big spends like the Winter Energy Payment, and look how far that’s gotten progressivism in this country. Whichever way you dice it, TOP have been building on sand since their inception, and if they ever do get into power and do implement their universalist policies, they won’t be out of the rain.

The rest of this article very much concerns actually getting elected, not the merits or faults of policy as implemented, and that starts with the most obvious thing staring us in the face. The Teal Card notably resembles the Gold Card: same colour code, same format, same basic concept. Let’s contextualise the true failure of this policy.

TOP keep polling at around 2-3%, well under the MMP threshold. To get any MPs in, TOP need to win Ilam this year, an electorate race which I’ll discuss in more depth another time. Even if they get in, they need to lock themselves in more stably with voters and remain over the 5% threshold, because they cannot guarantee that they will hold onto Ilam in the long term. It is clear from policies so exclusively focused on those under 30 that they want to be the NZFirst of youth (with the added benefit that young people have middle-aged parents very invested in their success).

Youth are not obsessed with the little cards we carry around, or sitting down at the dinner table and poring over our expenditures for the month, and it’d be a bit weird if your parents were doing either of those things. Youth are not reliable in general when it comes to voting - a significant part of any progressive coalition, but if youth had ever defied the trend that we just turn out less than any other age demographic, we’d be watching Prime Minister Jeremy Corbyn shake hands with President Bernie Sanders on TV today.

You can raise youth turnout as part of an overall strategy; you can’t cause a youthquake to shift the very ground the parties stand on. 2017 was a perfect run for a youthquake - TOP burst onto the scene, the Greens surged, then Jacindamania, and the fees-free uni announcement to cap it all off - and when the dust settled, youth turnout had risen in absolute terms by about 6.5%, or 18,000 voters, a tenth of the total turnout increase, from 2014, itself another failed run for youthquake-based politics.

Youth in Ilam in particular are not who you’re looking for. Yes, there’ll be lots - there’s lots of young families here, and lots more students around UC - but these are more fiscally conservative families begatting better-off children. This is not like Auckland Central (where Chloe Swarbrick could appeal to the considerably larger number of renters) or Wellington Central (which leans further left, and while fiscal conservatism isn’t antithetical to TOP, it is to perceived electoral bribes like the Teal Card).

My only caveat would be that, compared to the country, Ilam has relatively more white and Asian voters; white, uni-educated voters are TOP’s jam, and as their campaign will live or die by Raf Manji, I have some hope that he, as a man of Indian heritage who migrated here in the 21st century, can connect to many voters from similar backgrounds and with similar values in a way most of TOP might not. But NZFirst’s Gold Card relies on building a fond attachment with the grin of the man who gave it to you, and Raf Manji is no Winston Peters.

He wants to give you a teal card. Teal. Teal. Famously beloved colour teal. Teal, teal, you could probably poll a focus group and find a fifth of them couldn’t point to it on a colour wheel. Teal?! What is it even trying to mean? It's not the climate - we figured this out ourselves, but while Raf doesn't feel like telling us why he's raiding the CLIMATE FUND, he was happy to say the Teal Card isn't about the environment. He says it’s about political independence and policy difference?? Who makes that association??? Upon???? Seeing????? Teal??????? I’m losing it here. Absolutely losing it.

For context, he is referring to the wave of “teal independents” that recently swept Australia - blue-greens winning formerly safely right-wing seats full of well-off, well-educated voters. That is, of course, just what he wants to do here, and almost nobody in New Zealand was paying that much attention to the Australian election, sorry, mate. To quote from Newsroom’s good article on TOP’s environmentalism, “‘The opportunities are endless,’ the press release says. ‘Teal is the colour of opportunity,’ Manji tells me.” Opportunity is the perfect message to run on in this electorate, and opportunity is not what springs to mind when you look at a card to get a bunch of services for free.

To me, “teal” says that they’re trying to make you think of them every time you swipe. Who knows why the Gold Card is called that - maybe a reference to your golden years? - but it’s sick branding and it’s not the stamped face of Winston Peters. The teal card is neither of those things, but it sure feels like TOP, which in interminable internal deliberations has no doubt said “teal” a bunch of times and assumed the world heard it, is trying to stamp itself on your wallet in a simple, colour-coded way. (The funny thing is I’d be willing to bet my $5,000 that they seriously considered just calling it the “Opportunity Card”.)

For those paying attention, like me, it comes off as a blatant bribe - and don’t get me wrong, at the very least the major political parties engage in gross vote-buying all the time, but they’re subtle about it. A lot of people could see first-year fees-free was a vote-buyer and bad policy, but it sucked us all in to discussing whether it should instead be last year or first year free, all years free or no years free, what should be done about the state of education and were Labour the right ones to take it on.

This was branding intended to grab people’s attention and get them talking about the issues; the policy was not okay, but the presentation fulfilled a genuine civic obligation to engage everyday people and the plugged-in few alike in the democratic process, and if that happened to coincide with Labour’s self-interest, so be it.

There’s no way to rationalise or engage with the card being called by a teal name; if you know what it is, it is a black spot and TOP is already dead to you, or you’re ardently of the faithful and TOP has no reason to appeal to you. Such vote buying is unethical, and unlike for major parties soaked up to their necks in waste and politicking, it damages the brand of an earnest, outsider party trying to do the right thing when nobody else will.

For everybody else, which would be the large majority of people even if TOP were a party of serious stature in Parliament, it means nothing, signifies nothing, makes no sense. It is at once an overthink and brainless: a cultured, refined, let’s-dither-between-ourselves-in-think-tanks-and-business-conferences over what we want to name ourselves that reflects how almost nobody else thinks about their own politics, and just slapped onto a policy with no intent to communicate what it means or engage outside the faithful in the room.

"We have the means; we just need the collective will" is the quote on the wall behind Manji as he announces the Teal Card. They do not have the means to make a difference between their reach, because whatever bountiful riches and policy levers New Zealand could bring to bear on the issues, they will remain out of TOP’s reach so long as they do not reach outside their room. These people have the will; it is not an issue yet of do New Zealanders want to make ambitious changes to, say, how we financially support young people - it is an issue that TOP does not know how to reach them, and it does not know that it does not know that, because it thinks it is an issue of our lethargy and our uninformedness.

There is nothing of the TOP of the half dozen years in this announcement. There is no clear pitch to what you would think would be the evidential basis for youth-focused policy, like how wildly economic outcomes diverge based on how much you start with at 18. There is no plan to generate household wealth to attract the average Ilam voter. There is nothing here that can possibly help tackle the housing crisis, the key issue that drove TOP onto the scene - not only as a key proponent of tax-based solutions to the problem, but as fuel for the widespread frustration amongst young professionals that the system wasn’t working. Young professionals were not crying out for the two-party duopoly to finally take action on mental health visits and e-bike affordability.

Aside from plundering, say it with me everyone, the climate, emergency, response, fund, the rest of the funding for the Teal Card and National Civics Service comes from tax raises. These are tweaks around the margins targeted at companies and higher earners; they will not make anybody suffer in this cost of living crisis, they will ensure these policies are affordable and reasonable, and may help with the crisis by dampening demand slightly. They make little sense for a party trying to get elected in Ilam.

They make no sense for a party whose pitch is that capital gains is where the real meat is on the bones of New Zealand, and we ought to stop gnawing at the unsatisfying but striking white of corporate and personal incomes. Nobody looks at this funding side of things and thinks they get to dig in, which is a terrible pity, because it’s vanishingly rare for a party to ever capture that hunger for tax changes. Sure, you can talk about left-wing parties and wealth taxes, but the emphasis there is about taking money to redistribute to worthy programs - not the tax itself being the fix.

TOP had something there by centering capital gains and potentially having an angle to argue the leverageless, blueless, clueless Greens will never get it done. They have fumbled it away again - and they may announce it later, but I doubt they will get a second chance at getting attention, let alone just by reannouncing policy from the last time around. (Granted, Jacinda got away with it, but that’s because nobody even knew it was what Labour supported before she said it.)

TOP had a chance here to frame the Teal Card as a redistribution from wealthy boomers already on the ladder to young people deserving of an opportunity. I think that would not have been the optimal strategy, risking as it does that you can talk well-off homeowners into voting their social conscience, but it’s a clear case to run and it’s better than this. What’s bizarre about the Teal Card is that it’s all about subsidising youth access to life, but they have had no brand to do with youth.

That may sound odd - I keep mentioning them as TOP’s base, and I just advised running age-class warfare - but youth aren’t the focus emotively or explicitly policy-wise; TOP paints itself as the mature voice in the room, the younger size of middle aged, saying what all the experts agree upon, not as a populist voice for angry young people like the Greens so clearly have already dominated. Good luck running a 5% strategy based on convincing 19 year olds Manji the bluegreen banker is a better fit for them than Swarbrick the substantive celebrity.

Age-class warfare at least works because you tie into themes of opportunity and compete there with National - Chris Hipkins has pivoted away from fairness and equality towards opportunity too, but Sarah Pallett’s local campaign seems likelier to me to emphasise Jacindisms and gamble on that aforementioned social conscience from those in the middle class who have already secured their own lot and are looking to the world around them.

TOP has needed for a long time now, perhaps since the 2017 election and certainly since Geoff Simmons took over, to learn how to really get attention and make sense to people outside their wheelhouse again. Gareth and Plunket were plonkers who repeated the Kim Dotcom problem of kicking dust over your own platform, but people paid attention to them. In the spirit of my kind words about fees-free earlier, it was Jacinda who really nailed it that year: she often spoke vaguely and dodged like a politician, but she clearly stood for doing better than this and you could sense the general direction of travel.

I have a high opinion of Manji as a candidate too, even if I’m more skeptical of his campaign so far. Why Jacinda’s pitch worked was that she was building on the work laid in the years before her by countless Labour Party members, not least amongst them David Shearer and Andrew Little. She could reheat their ambitious policies and be trusted. Raf Manji can be trusted; I’m not tasting what he’s cooking. Put it back in the oven. They needed to start preheating for this ages ago and they’ve just dumped a frozen whole chicken on the dinner table. When we’re all just trying to tally our expenditures across the cost of living crisis, that gives us no hope that we’ll be full even if it gets the chance to defrost through tomorrow.

I increasingly view this election, likely to be close and an inflection point, as about cleaning house and resetting after a thoroughly unsatisfactory era in New Zealand politics. Labour need to get some competent people in, figure out how to get things done, and relearn genuine and lasting connection with a broader electorate than Wellington, Christchurch and half of Auckland. National must raise their standards - no, not the educational kind, put those away. I mean both for their personnel and for the policy they’re putting out.

ACT will, for the first time since 2008, be put to the test as a serious governing partner with a national influence on policy, meaning not to dismiss their genuinely notable policy achievements under that government but to speak about scale. The Māori Party will have to move beyond niche political interests and rhetorical battles to figure out a policy platform of their own (and also log Rawiri off Facebook, sit him down with a Netflix subscription, and set Servant of the People as the only item on his My List). The Greens….have to do something, anything, please. By this point Peter Dunne borderline feels as influential as them, and I have as much influence as he does. (Await my discussion of the Greens in that bluegreen article.)

This is TOP’s chance to recognise that this is not what will work. Commit and do it right, with a plan to lay the foundations at this election and survive out in the real world for the next three years instead of writing yourselves off as limp ducks already. Produce serious, achievable, sensible policy aligned with themes that connect to where voters are at and make sense as a priority amidst climate and cost of living crisis, or go away.

Because if it’s hard enough for you alone to get to 5%, it’s impossible for any would-be competitor to break into the anti-status quo, third-party against the duopoly space. That doesn’t mean that one is waiting in the wings right now, but it does mean that discontent is being siphoned off into Gareth’s old vehicle rather than bubbling up and incentivising new champions to step into the ring. The sooner TOP go away, the sooner we get our next Gareth. And the sooner good people like Raf, who have done a lot for this city and put a lot of work into harnessing their talents, can go somewhere where they can make a real difference for New Zealanders with their efforts. Ka kite ano when we discuss Ilam.