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Opportunity has published five policies it calls non-negotiable. The five are short. They name problems most households already recognise. They contain almost no numbers, definitions, legal instruments, costs or transition rules. Any partner must accept them before the party will support a government.
The party’s larger policy platform – a 1.75 per cent annual tax on urban land (0.5 on rural), a Citizen’s Income of roughly $19,400 a year for most adults, compulsory KiwiSaver contributions rising toward a combined 12 per cent and Citizens’ Assemblies of randomly selected people to whose recommendations a government must answer – has drawn resistance.
Their main message is radical change. Now their bottom lines seem moderate – just long enough to pose as electable.
Luxon has ruled them out. Labour has expressed concern. The party itself has indicated the tax reforms may be deferred beyond the first term. The five bottom lines therefore sit in front –while the other radical policies sit on the shelf.
The narrative on their website video is explicit: the larger party in government will do the work. Opportunity will insist on the five. Someone else will supply the modelling, the legal drafting, the fiscal path and detail because they can’t.
That is just an activist group setting conditions for its support rather than a political party presenting a costed programme it is prepared to defend.
A party seeking to enter parliament is ordinarily expected to show how its measures would improve the existing situation. Opportunity has made the demand and left the implementation to others.
When Opportunity says the larger party will do the work, is it hinting at Labour? Its general manager is former Labour Minister Iain Lees-Galloway, who co-founded a start-up with Toni Grace – Hipkins’ partner. The party says it will talk to either side. You can decide what that is worth.
Recent coverage has former board members describing a toxic internal culture and factional disputes, with two abrupt resignations. Three weeks out from an election – a party campaigning against tribalism is having trouble.
Opportunity’s first bottom line is to give the Commerce Commission additional power to force structural separation of anti-competitive businesses “across our entire economy”, starting with the supermarket duopoly. No threshold is given for what counts as anti-competitive. No definition of structural separation is supplied. No estimate of legal cost or time is offered.
New Zealand already has a Commerce Commission and a grocery commissioner. Food, power and fuel prices have surged. The commission can already investigate and write reports. It has not stopped the price rises that appear on household invoices. The same absence appears on price gouging and excessive profit.
The bottom line simply asserts that the commission will intervene and prices will fall – magically. You are entitled to ask what additional power, short of price control, would produce a different result.
The pattern is the same across the remaining four bottom lines.
Cleaning up politics requires a mandatory lobbyist register and code of conduct, plus a cap on donations limited to registered voters. No dollar figure for the cap is stated. No definition of who counts as a lobbyist is given. No enforcement body or penalties are named. The wider platform’s Citizens’ Assemblies proposal – a paid, randomly selected panel that would sit for up to a year and send recommendations government must respond to – creates a second process for policy advice. That could easily be described as a lobby group.
That is not listed as a bottom line, but it is a contradiction to cleaning up politics and ridding it of lobbyists.
Fix the health system requires a 10-year cross-party plan and more funding for healthcare workers and primary care. No dollar amount, funding source or service targets are supplied. Health spending already sits above $32 billion. The waiting lists are still there and the emergency departments are still full. Calling for even more money and a 10-year plan does not explain what changes, what gets cut or what the extra money is supposed to buy. More has already been tried.
Revive ocean health requires an immediate end to bottom trawling in the most damaged inshore areas (Hauraki Gulf is named), then a staged phase-out. No map, timetable, compensation for quota holders or estimate of the effect on catch and export revenue is provided. This is virtue-signalling until the how-to-do is supplied.
Restore climate credibility requires New Zealand to recommit to its Paris Agreement obligations and protect the role of the Climate Change Commission. No new target is set. No pathway for agricultural methane is described. No statement is made on Emissions Trading Scheme settings. No estimate of fiscal or sectoral cost is provided. The wider platform’s energy plans that talk of adding 30 GW by 2050 and consolidating distributors are left outside of the non-negotiables.
No amount of wealth exchange from New Zealand taxpayers to NGOs is going to change the climate. All you will do is make New Zealanders poorer and limit productivity – the very issue that no one wants to talk about. New Zealand already sits in the bottom half of the OECD on labour productivity and ranks 28th out of 38 countries for GDP per hour worked, almost 25 per cent below the OECD average and well behind Australia. That gap has not closed in two decades.
The policies that would actually shift money and power – the land-value tax, the universal payment, compulsory savings and the second chamber of randomly selected people – have been left off the list of conditions. The party’s Tax Reset modelling relies on favourable assumptions about household composition, land values and smooth netting of income-tax changes against the new land tax. Those assumptions have not been stress-tested. The five therefore function as the public face while the fiscal package remains negotiable.
Many voters will agree that supermarket competition is weak, that lobbyists should be registered, that health needs a better outlook, that some fishing practices damage habitat, and that looking after local pollution and clean waterways is worthwhile. New Zealand accounts for about 0.17 per cent of global greenhouse-gas emissions. That share does not justify the scale of the targets and the cost of the schemes built around them.
Climate policy should not depend on emission-trading schemes that no one other than global fund managers fully understand.
A party that wants support is expected to show how its measures would improve the situation that already exists.
So the question that remains: if a party can list the problems, withhold the larger policies that attracted criticism, and then require someone else to do the ‘donkey’ work, what exactly is the voter getting?
The reader can decide whether that is a programme or a list of conditions issued in advance of the work and whether they are just relying on the naivety of new voters and the disenchanted left – or both.
Five problems, no answers – and a bunch of shelved agendas waiting to be unleashed. Is this the Trojan horse many suggested from day one?
