TOP has a new policy platform, a new leader and a newly curious supporter base. After a decade on the margins, is this finally the party’s year, asks Catherine McGregor in today’s excerpt from The Bulletin.

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The TOP moment

The Opportunity Party is polling 3.3% in the latest 1News Verian poll – its best result at this stage in any previous cycle – and attracting a level of commentary that would have seemed implausible a year ago. Much of the recent attention has been prompted by media chatter that Labour might step aside in Mt Albert for leader Qiulae Wong (think National’s Epsom arrangement with Act) to get TOP into parliament and set Labour up with a less tricky coalition partner than Te Pāti Māori. Wong denies any conversation with Labour, adding that, as a centrist party, they wouldn’t be interested in making a pre-election deal with the left.

Would such an arrangement make sense anyway? Labour held Mt Albert by just 18 votes in 2023, but Newsroom’s Jonathan Milne says that was an outlier result. This year, “Frankly, I don’t think Labour could lose Helen Clark and Jacinda Ardern’s old Mt Albert electorate if it tried.”

A sign of the party’s renewed energy is the donations it has received from opposite political camps, Newsroom’s Hanna McCallum reports. Longtime Labour and Greens funder Phillip Mills and tech entrepreneur and right-bloc backer Brian Cartmell have both donated $100k, with Mills telling Newsroom that, for the first time, he believes “there is a genuine shot that they will get in”.

What they’re offering

Last week the party released its first tranche of policy under a ‘tax reset’ banner. As the Post’s Nick James reports, it includes a “citizen income” (a UBI, in other words) of $19,400 tax-free per year for every adult citizen or permanent resident, which would involve scrapping jobseeker and student allowances; a land value tax of 1.75% in urban areas and 0.5% in rural, projected to raise $24 billion annually; and a “KiwiSaver 2.0” requiring 12% compulsory contributions (6% each from employer and employee), phased in over eight years. Tax brackets would also be simplified: 28% for annual income up to $50,000; 34% for income between $50,001 and $200,000; and 39% for income over $200,000.

Wong says the net effect “will be, we think, the biggest tax cut to working New Zealanders ever or at least in a few decades.” Under full implementation, she says, 70% would pay less tax, 20% would see little change, and 10% would pay more.

Can they really appeal to both sides?

The party’s rising profile has attracted both admiration and cynicism. Writing in Stuff, Verity Johnson says an increasing number of her “smart, elder-millennial” friends are name-dropping Opportunity. “Now, I wouldn’t have said it was everyone talking TOP. But it was a certain type of someone. Smart. Restless. Urban. Thoroughly pissed off with the status quo.”

Her thesis in support of TOP is that a sizeable voting bloc have soured on the coalition but are not ready to forgive Labour, finding themselves politically homeless. Which is where Opportunity is finding its, er, chance.

Newsroom’s Milne is less enchanted. His central critique is that the party’s “blue-green” branding has a historically centre-right pedigree but TOP’s actual policies are, in his words, “unequivocally left-of-centre, tax-and-spend, redistributionist red”. The contradiction makes TOP’s electoral strategy incoherent, he argues: the party can’t credibly woo right-of-centre voters while also proposing a land tax and a UBI.

A tough hill to climb

The other problem is that their supporter base remains tiny. TOP’s polling average this year has been 2.3%, not the 3.3% of the most recent single poll. Without an electorate seat to their name, the 5% bar is unforgiving and hard to surmount.

Former United Future leader Peter Dunne says TOP is in their best position yet, but warns the “wasted vote” problem remains their immediate challenge. “It’s a real mindset that [voters] want to see a return for their vote, if you like,” he tells RNZ’s Alexia Russell. “It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way.”

Yet, as Milne notes, the decline of the two major parties’ vote share is prompting many supporters to believe TOP now has its best shot at a seat since the party’s founding by Gareth Morgan in November 2016. Are they right? Time will tell.