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Political polls provide a snapshot of voters’ views at a particular moment in time. While polls conducted months before an election cannot reliably predict the outcome – given the potential for unforeseen events – they nonetheless offer political parties a valuable guide as to how they are tracking with the electorate.
Last month’s Roy Morgan poll delivered a warning to National – and its coalition supporters. It showed support for National had dropped 4.5 points to 26.5 per cent – its lowest level since the last election. ACT was up two to 10, and New Zealand First was up 1.5 to 11 – its highest support since 2023.
Labour increased four to 34 per cent, while the Greens fell 3.5 to 11, and the Māori Party rose 0.5 to three.
On these results, a National-led coalition with ACT and New Zealand First, and a Labour-led coalition with the Greens and the Māori Party would be tied on 60 seats each. National’s representation in parliament would fall from 49 seats to just 33. That loss of 16 seats, would take out all five list MPs – Nicola Willis, Paul Goldsmith, Gerry Brownlee, Melissa Lee and Nancy Lu – along with many of the MPs in the marginal seats they won from Labour in 2023 including Hutt South’s Chris Bishop with a majority of 1,332 over Labour’s Ginny Andersen.
ACT would gain two seats to 13 and NZ First would gain six to 14.
For opposition parties, Labour’s support would increase by eight seats to 42, the Greens would lose one seat to 14, and the Māori Party would win four seats – down two.
The predicted party-vote scenario could create a significant overhang of parliament. This occurs when parties win more electorate seats than their party vote allocation. It’s already the case with the Māori Party gaining two additional seats, but it’s conceivable that National could add to an overhang if they hold their marginal electorates.
Creating an overhang has been a deliberate election strategy of the Māori Party – and one they are again promoting for 2026, according to an article written by Māori Party Te Tai Tokerau MP Mariameno Kapa-Kingi:
This election will be a close one. The left bloc of parliament is only two seats away from changing the government. The pathway is clear. Māori have the choice to support the Greens or Labour with our party vote to create the numbers needed to form a left-wing government. The candidate vote, on the other hand, can be used to strengthen Māori representation by backing a candidate who must win in Te Tai Tokerau in order to enter parliament. If we split our votes with purpose, we can achieve greater Māori representation across parties and parliament as a whole.
So there we have it: By asking supporters to give them their electorate vote but their party vote to Labour or the Greens to shore up the left-wing bloc, the Māori Party wants to create an overhang in parliament to add more MPs than their party vote entitles them to.
Choosing the coalition they want to govern the country is now the key choice for voters at an election – whether they want a centre-right coalition of National, ACT and New Zealand First or a coalition of the radical left with Labour, the Greens, and the Māori Party.
There’s no doubt that a future Labour-led coalition would be the most extreme in New Zealand’s history: a toxic mix of racist separatists would call the shots and dictate the future of our country.
Even Labour, the party built on representing workers, has moved to the extreme left as a result of Jacinda Ardern pushing her Marxist identity politics agenda, shifting the struggle for social justice away from the working class to the so-called ‘oppressed’ groups in society centred on gender, race, and sexuality.
This alienation of workers by Labour has been noted by New Zealand First’s Leader Winston Peters, who is now repositioning his party to welcome them into the fold.
This week’s NZCPR guest commentator Dr Grant Duncan, a research associate at Auckland University’s Public Policy Institute, analysed Winston Peters’ recent ‘State of the Nation’ address and outlines New Zealand First’s strategy:
‘Let’s give power back to the people’ was Winston’s new populist slogan as he sets his sights on voters who feel alienated from Labour and alarmed by Labour’s potential coalition partners.
NZ First, he said, would welcome former Labour voters who feel abandoned. He also raised the spectre of Labour having to work with the Greens and Te Pāti Māori, if they’re in a position to form the next government.
The recruitment of Alfred Ngaro signifies that Pacific voters are a particular target. In 2005, Auckland’s Pacific communities boosted turnout and gave Labour, under Helen Clark, a narrow win over National. They were voting with their economic interests, but against their Christian conservatism. NZ First is now combining social conservatism with concern for the economic struggles of blue-collar workers, aiming to draw that constituency away from Labour.
Winston’s strategy is textbook nationalist populism. Traditional mainstream parties, he says, have failed to serve the people. In particular, the left-wing socially progressive parties have lost touch, he argues, with the concerns of ordinary commonsense hard-working folk. The plan is that disillusioned former Labour voters – fed up with, if not pushed aside by, identity politics and Tiriti obsession – will migrate across to NZ First, joining conservatives who are already there. Labour is the target because Winston would rather leave National alone for the time being.
Dr Duncan explains how similar populist parties using similar tactics overseas are now humbling traditional big-tent parties on the left and on the right and, he suggests, there’s no reason to think that New Zealand is any less ‘ripe’ for this kind of political shift.
With Nigel Farage’s Reform Party hoovering up Labour and Conservative Party votes in England, and Pauline Hansen’s One Nation Party doing the same in Australia, New Zealand First could be onto a winning strategy. By targeting workers, they are clearly targeting voters who were previously loyal to Labour to build support for the present coalition.
A second poll released recently by the Taxpayers’ Union had better news for the coalition: National was up 1.4 points to 29.8 per cent, New Zealand First up 3.9 to 13.6, and ACT up 1.5 to nine, giving them a total of 65 seats – enough to govern.
With Labour down 1 to 33.4 per cent, the Greens down 2.7 to 7.8, and the Māori Party down 0.6 to 2.6, the opposition parties would secure 55 seats.
But the big question in all of this is why isn’t National doing better?
Part of the reason is that they had a single-minded focus on economic recovery and while they might have gained widespread support this year if their policies had delivered the growth they’d hoped for, international events have put paid to that.
But another key point goes back to the scale of the disaster that Labour left behind when they were voted out of office in 2023. It wasn’t just their reckless economic management and catastrophic incompetence that covered all areas of governance that concerned voters, it was their attack on democracy through the unmandated embedding of He Puapua throughout the public sector.
Few New Zealanders really understood the extent to which this radical agenda – aimed at replacing democracy with tribal rule by 2040 – had been entrenched in our regulatory framework. In fact, many of the almost 20,000 new employees hired during their time in office, were committed to identity politics and He Puapua. They are the ones who have been defending Labour policies and fighting all attempts by the coalition to remove them.
And they are everywhere, as evidenced by the revelation that identity politics DEI ideology has been embedded within the Defence Force; to the cultural takeover of the Medical Council regulating doctors and imposing on them the same requirement to prioritise Māori that have been forced onto nurses and pharmacists; to the failure of the public service to the uphold coalition directives to prioritise English in their names and public communications – as evidenced by failure of the Public Service Commission and Land Information New Zealand along with those officials and public broadcasters that prioritise Māori; to local body councils that are being taken over by iwi activists appointed onto councils as advisors and given voting rights… the list goes on and on.
The problem for National is that while a number of ‘fixes’ are in the pipeline, they have not been prioritised. The requirement to remove DEI from the public service sits in a Public Sector Amendment Bill that’s languishing on the Order Paper – but once that’s passed, a directive could be issued across the entire state sector to eliminate DEI initiatives as part of the coalition’s “back to basics” agenda.
While cabinet has approved changes to ensure that “clinical competence” not “cultural ideology” drives professional health standards, an amendment to the Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Act – to guide the Medical Council, Nurses Council and Pharmacists’ Council – has not yet appeared.
Instead of an all‑of‑government directive instructing public service departments to prioritise English in their names and public communications, cabinet decided individual ministers would take responsibility for ensuring compliance in their own departments. Without adequate follow-up, the rollout has been uneven, and responsible ministers need to be held to account.
And with the Local Government (System Improvements) Amendment Bill to force councils to stick to their knitting and remove their focus on cultural wellbeing sitting on the Order Paper ready to be passed into law, a simple Supplementary Order Paper from the minister, containing an amendment to Schedule 7 of the bill to the effect that a person must not be appointed as a member of a committee or subcommittee of a local authority unless they are a democratically elected member of that local authority, could easily be passed during the committee stages of the bill, to fix the major attack on democracy that is underway in a growing number of regions throughout the country.
The failure to ‘fix’ such problems is attributed to National, with accusations it is either deaf to public concerns – or lacking the backbone to deal with the problems head on. As a result, they are losing support, not only to their coalition partners – who are much more attuned to the problems and are promising to ‘fix’ them once and for all in a new government – but to Labour as well.
On their website, the ACT Party clearly states, “Eliminate race-based policies across all areas of government: Wherever policies divide New Zealanders based on ethnicity, ACT will challenge and remove them. That includes reviewing remaining regulations and legislation that embed race-based considerations into law and public funding decisions.”
That’s exactly what’s needed given the entrenched opposition to coalition policies that’s now embedded within the state sector.
When it comes to New Zealand First, the Herald’s Senior Political Correspondent Audrey Young shared this insight from the Taxpayer Union poll: “Curia pollster David Farrar has broken down NZ First’s support in a Patreon post and says that 52 per cent of its current supporters voted National in 2023, while only three per cent voted Labour. That will be a huge worry for National, which would lose 11 MPs on current polling. NZ First would more than double its caucus from eight to 17.”
That move of National voters towards New Zealand First is following the same trend that’s underway in the UK and now Australia, where major parties are losing disillusioned supporters to parties that are promising to address their concerns.
And with an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 swing voters in New Zealand, who are known to determine the outcome of elections, getting the message right is vital.
It’s time for National MPs to wake up – or many will be looking for a new job come November 7.
This article was originally published by the New Zealand Centre for Political Research.
