Yvonne van Dongen
Veteran NZ journo incredulous gender ideology escaped the lab. Won’t rest until reality makes a comeback.
It’s fair to say that the leader of the revamped Opportunity Party Qiulae Wong is the best looking of all the political leaders contesting the 2026 New Zealand election.
Friends swear that the party’s candidates are also better looking than the usual cohort of pollies. Teal is a great colour and their merch looks attractive, as does their logo. I couldn’t possibly comment but what I have noticed is that the party, formerly known as TOP, has had an uncommonly easy time from the media, who have sought to boost them whenever possible. It’s hardly surprising that their star is rising in the polls.
Only in the last week has a critical lens been applied to Op Party policies exposing contradictions when it came to donations and also the ability of their unelected board (heavily represented by generous donors) to override the wishes of their elected candidates.
In an interview with Q&A host Jack Tame, Wong was ambushed by this information. Former PM Helen Clark later described the interview as a “train wreck”. She said it revealed “fantasy posing as policy.” To her credit, Wong did not appear in the least rattled.
So when I learned Wong was holding a meeting at the Pt Chevalier Bowling Club I was intrigued enough to attend. I know Pt Chev well. I lived there for 10 years when my children were small. That was in the ’90s when the population of Pt Chev consisted of the ‘newly weds and nearly deads’.
When I moved into the seaside suburb, I was at the youthful end of this spectrum. My neighbours fit the profile of ‘nearly deads’. They kept immaculate gardens and often put veges in my letter box. One man even regularly rolled his lawn with a hoofing great concrete roller I’d never seen before or since.
I have friends who still live in Pt Chev having progressed over time from the newly weds to the nearly deads. They tell me the make-up of the suburb has changed a lot over the decades, along with rising house prices. They describe young people with inherited money and others with well-paid work moving in. When we landed there, tradies and retirees were the main demographic.
Pt Chevalier sits in the Mt Albert electorate. This is the electorate Qiulae Wong hopes to win. Historically Mt Albert has had a strong Labour association (both former prime ministers Helen Clark and Jacinda Ardern held the seat in their time) but which now could be marginal. At the 2023 election Labour incumbent MP Helen White only won by 18 votes. Green MP Ricardo Menéndez March is also standing in Mt Albert.
The event last Sunday wasn’t my first ever TOP meeting. In 2023 I attended a meeting they held in a tiny Ponsonby Rd bar. About 25 people squashed inside to hear enthusiastic young folk outline their vision for the future. Also present was Boyd Swinburn, professor of Population Nutrition and Global Health at Auckland University and member of Health Coalition Aotearoa. I remember I tried to engage him in the sex v gender debate at the time but he was dismissive. It just wasn’t important to someone more concerned with weightier topics such as unhealthy food, alcohol, and tobacco. The rights of women – pfft.
Swinburn is clearly a dedicated Topper since he was also at the Sunday meeting. So was a former television producer and two former journos I recognised. I’ve heard some commentators describe Op supporters as ‘lanyard-wearing technocrats’. Others say it’s a party made up of entrepreneurs and consultants. We know that former disgraced Labour politician Iain Lees-Galloway is behind the rejuvenation of the party, leading many to accuse the Opportunity Party of being a Labour Trojan horse.
In any case, the audience on Sunday were largely white, with a fair smattering of older folk but also enough younger ones to give the room a frisson of energy.
Unlike the tiny gathering in 2023, this time at least 120 people were gathered around tables and scattered seats inside the Bowling Club. The air was one of anticipation given recent polls showing the Op as kingmaker.
Qiulae Wong looked unfazed by all the attention. She stepped up to the raised platform and took the microphone like a pro. The backstory is that she got the job after answering an ad on Seek. She had previously worked overseas in a for-profit business that encouraged businesses to measure themselves not simply by profit but by their social and environmental impact.
She confessed in the preamble to her speech that she’d wanted to be a fashion designer when she was younger but not just any kind of fashion designer. She wanted clothing to be a vehicle for change. No more relying on an extractive economy, on individualism and profit above all else. She wanted to do things differently.
“The reason things feel so divided is because it’s the old world trying to hold on to the way things have been.”
Op’s plan to clean-up politics included time limits on the ability to lobby for former politicians, limits on the size of donations and setting up an independent Anti-Corruption body, something NZ First proposed some 33 years ago. Needless to say, it never eventuated.
Op also wants a land-value tax to shift taxation away from income and towards property and they would like a $370-a-week Citizens’ Income for adults. A stuff poll found that 54 per cent opposed the land tax proposal and 47 per cent liked the prospect of a citizen’s income. Figures. Free money, yes please. Tax on your land, er no thanks. To ensure the Citizen’s Income is achievable, Op advocates greater public sector efficiency ultimately leading to a smaller public sector.
What else do they want?
- To substantially expand marine protected areas, with a target of protecting 30 per cent of New Zealand’s ocean territory by 2035.
- To reform the electricity market to address incentives that they say contribute to underinvestment in new generation and higher prices.
- More investment in R&D. New Zealand invests far less in R&D than the OECD average – around 1.5 per cent of GDP compared with about three per cent across the OECD.
- To give the Commerce Commission greater powers to enforce recommendations it has already made and to tackle entrenched competition problems, including the power to seek the break-up of duopolies.
Despite the prime minister rejecting the Opportunity Party as a prospective coalition partner, Wong insisted they are pragmatic and will work across the political spectrum.
“We want to be the circuit breaker for politics in New Zealand.”
Then it was question time and, my goodness, how revealing it was. This was the moment I learned who made up the Op audience. I asked Qiulae Wong what the party’s views were on sex-based rights for women. She replied that they didn’t like the bill to define sex. It was ‘unhelpful’ and she felt it was important for people ‘to be who they are’. But she agreed women needed to feel protected. As far as sports went, she thought the government had the balance right when it came to trans in community and competitive sport.
At that the room clapped – the only time the entire afternoon that they clapped in reply to a question. This told me everything I needed to know about their supporters. Op Party peeps hail from the smug progressives. My favourite.
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack.
