With National and Labour’s combined polling at a 30-year low, has New Zealand fallen out of love with the big two? 

The only consolation for Chris, as his party fell by a point to a grim 29% in the new Verian poll for 1News, is that Chris’s fell by five points. For Chris, despite that drop, at least he could say his lot remained above Chris’s, on 32%. 

For Chris and Chris alike, the shared misery is that people are increasingly looking elsewhere.

Here’s how the last couple of years look for the seven most popular parties in the poll:

The New Zealand First Party’s mastery of the frenemy strategy – simultaneously part of and a fierce critic of the government – is impressive. It has prompted National to lash back across the last few months, and again at the party’s Hutt Valley gathering on the weekend, where Simeon Brown seemed not just to suggest that he was Winston Peters’ and David Seymour’s daddy – an image which, you’ll be astonished to hear, did not go down well with either of them – but also to state baldly of NZ First (his tearaway son) that New Zealanders “just can’t trust them”. 

The broader point is that the purple vote – that is, the Labour and National colours smushed together – has slumped. It has slumped to its lowest point in the poll for three decades. 

Something has shifted. Across the six elections from 2005 to 2020, the purple vote was 77%. Three months out from the last election, National and Labour were polling a combined 66%. And it wasn’t because of NZ First – they were just 3% at the time. 

Chris Bishop was then National campaign manager. He didn’t decide to announce himself to be Winston Peters’ daddy, but he did suggest that the polls had exaggerated small party support. “People like to flirt a bit. At the end of the day people do put their vote in the majors on election day.” They didn’t. National and Labour won a combined 65%. 

This pattern is reflected in many parts of the world. In the UK, the traditional big two, Labour and Conservative, are consistently outpolled by Nigel Farage and Reform – sometimes they’re down in third and fourth, behind the Greens. This shifting of the plates sits underneath much of the prime ministerial musical chairs witnessed all the way up to this week, when Keir Starmer was forced to chuck it in.

Will all of that embolden the parties of Chris to up their offers, to step out of the “Coke and Pepsi” label thrown at them by Winston Peters for several decades and most recently on Sunday? Or is it just, as Luxon has suggested of late, the nature of a maturing MMP system. That might be true, but it will do nothing to settle the nerves of the senior National MPs who face electoral oblivion. 

The Opportunity Party finishing above 4% in this latest poll is another shock to the duopoly system. And it has not come at the expense of the Greens. They have fallen at every electoral hurdle before, but the nature of the threshold in our MMP system means that if – big if though it is – they continue to lift their profile under Qiulae Wong and ride over that 5% polling mark, it could prove a tipping point, removing the disincentive that lingers in minds that votes might be wasted. 

One final note of interest: there’s still plenty of undecided vote out there. The combined “don’t know” and “refused” category in this poll is a comparatively high 14%, up from 9% in April.