Moving the election to October 17 is not National's first choice, but leader Judith Collins says she is "perfectly happy to work with it".
Ms Collins had told Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern yesterday National's preference was November 21. Today, Ms Ardern announced it would be pushed back just four weeks from the original date of September 19.
"It was always National’s view that to have a fair, democratic election, we needed to deal with this second wave of Covid-19 so politicians from all parties had a reasonable chance to present their policies, and the public felt comfortable engaging with the campaign without putting their health at risk," Ms Collins said.
"I'm perfectly happy there is a delay because ultimately it's (Jacinda Ardern's) choice and we need to work with it."
Ms Collins said she had always felt her party had a "fighting chance" to win the election - despite the latest 1 NEWS Colmar Brunton Poll on July 30 seeing the party on 32 per cent.
"This is actually not about me or the National Party, it's about people," she said. "We are mostly an electorate MP party, the people need to be able to look at who are the candidates, it's not just the party vote for us."
"People need to be able to have public meetings to ask their candidates questions. They need to know who they are voting for."
Ms Collins said with the election delay, the National Party now "have the ability to get policy out".
"We hope what we've seen in the last week, in the catastrophic failure at the border, will actually have been resolved by then and people will know quite how this virus came back into the country."
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