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The numbers are in and they’re worse than the headlines suggest.
The Good Oil’s Poll of Polls – built on the David Farrar (Curia) methodology of sample-size and time-decay weighting across every credible public poll in the field – paints a picture the Beehive press office is desperately trying to spin away.
The weighted average across five active pollsters has Labour on 35.2 per cent, National on 29.6 per cent. That is not a one-poll wobble. That is five pollsters, 4,941 respondents, all telling the same story.
But the headline number masks the real intrigue. On a strict Sainte-Laguë seat allocation, the coalition still scrapes home – 62 seats to 58. A very thin majority. The margins for errors from the government are wafer thin too.
And here is the part Christopher Luxon will never say out loud: that majority exists for one reason and one reason only. Winston Peters.
Strip out NZ First and National plus ACT combined sit at just 37.7 per cent. That’s not a government. That’s an opposition-in-waiting. Every seat the coalition holds beyond bare survival is being delivered by the bloke Luxon’s people spent the last campaign quietly briefing against.
The Preferred PM Number Is Brutal
Chris Hipkins – a man who lost an election by the largest margin in modern history – now leads the preferred PM stakes on 20.7 per cent. Luxon trails on 18.2 per cent. The sitting prime minister of New Zealand cannot beat the bloke he sent packing in 2023.
And then there’s Winston, on 12.3 per cent and rising. The foreign minister is now within six points of his boss on the question of who should actually run the country. That has never happened in modern New Zealand politics. Not in October ’17 when Winston was kingmaker. Not in ’23 when National was crowing about its mandate. Never.
What the Numbers Actually Mean
Three things are now true that weren’t true six months ago:
One: The ‘team of three’ framing is finished. This is no longer a coalition with NZ First as a junior partner. NZ First IS the coalition. Without them it collapses on contact.
Two: Luxon’s leadership is a problem the caucus can no longer ignore. When your PM is being out-polled by both the leader of the opposition AND your own foreign minister, the question stops being ‘if’ and starts being ‘when’. That’s why Stuart Smith was trying to get a meeting before Easter – and why Luxon was ducking him.
Three: Winston’s “Power to the People” State of the Nation speech in Tauranga on 22 March now reads like a man who saw all of this coming a month before the rest of the press gallery did. Alfred Ngaro defecting from National wasn’t poaching. It was rats reading the manifest.
The Real Question for Today’s Caucus
National MPs will sit down this morning and pretend everything is fine. The whips will tell them to hold the line. Bishop will say he has ‘complete confidence’ while keeping his powder very, very dry.
But the Poll of Polls doesn’t lie. The honeymoon is over. The mandate is gone. And the lifeboat in the storm isn’t flying a blue flag – it’s flying a black one with NZ First in white letters across it.
Luxon’s choice is no longer about leadership style. It’s about whether he understands his own government any more.
Methodology: The Good Oil Poll of Polls uses the Curia (David Farrar) methodology – sample-size weighted, time-decay weighted (100 per cent for polls ≤7 days old, declining linearly to 0 per cent at 38 days), one poll per pollster. Seats calculated using Sainte-Laguë on a 120-seat parliament with the five per cent party-vote threshold. Polls included as at 20 April 2026: 1News-Verian (20 Apr), Taxpayers’ Union-Curia (7 Apr), Roy Morgan (28 Mar), RNZ-Reid Research (23 Mar) and Talbot Mills (18 Mar).
