Despite not having made it to parliament, the Opportunity Party has already been proclaimed a potential “kingmaker” following next month’s election.
By Grant Duncan for The Conversation
That would see the newcomer party decide who governs if it ends up holding the balance of power – just as New Zealand First’s Winston Peters did, or appeared to do, in 2017.
Back then, it was genuinely hard to know whether Peters would lean left or right, until he announced he would go into a coalition with Dame Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Party to form a government.
But has Opportunity already made up its mind which party it wants to support in government? Does it even have a choice?
National Party leader and Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has repeatedly ruled out working with Opportunity in forming his next government, assuming he gets another chance.
He points to Opportunity’s plan to introduce a land tax, and is encouraging centre-right voters to back National and not even think about supporting anyone else.
But any practically-minded person can do the arithmetic: based on opinion polls, it appears Luxon may not be able to form a government without Opportunity’s numbers. Furthermore, Opportunity leader Qiulae Wong says she’s open to talking with National after the election.
Still, Luxon affirms he couldn’t be "any clearer" about refusing to work with Opportunity. To many observers, this might seem self-sabotaging. Yet it isn’t as irrational as some might suppose.
Reading the signals
The 1News Verian Poll continues to have Opportunity in the kingmaker seat. (Source: 1News)
Ruling out Opportunity sends a signal to centre-right voters – National’s core constituency – not to stray from the fold. This would lower Opportunity’s numbers at the election, if not push them below the 5% threshold needed to enter parliament.
Wong appears not to favour working with National in a similar multi-party coalition anyway. She too could not have been clearer when she said:
"We are not here to prop up the current coalition government. If that coalition agreement was put in front of us, we would have walked away."
Opportunity is not insisting on its land tax in any coalition agreement. But its five published bottom lines – including ending bottom-trawling, recommitting to climate action and capping political donations – are more compatible with a Labour-led administration that would include the Green Party.
National Party leader Christopher Luxon has ruled out working with Opportunity. (Source: 1News)
Labour has also sounded its preference for a three-party coalition with the Greens and Opportunity – enabling it to sideline Te Pāti Māori in coalition negotiations.
Still, the question remains: if Opportunity makes it over 5%, what happens if National can’t form a government without it? Given all he’s said, Luxon may have to resign to make a reversal politically palatable.
But there’s another theoretically possible post-election scenario. That’s a National-ACT-New Zealand First coalition reforming itself with renewed agreements and returning to office with a minority of seats – supported by a confidence-and-supply agreement with Opportunity, positioned on the cross benches.
Such an agreement would give the coalition the numbers to govern, with some concessions around policy.
Confidence and supply?
This kind of arrangement could also make sense for the long-term survival of Opportunity as a centrist party, given none of their candidates yet have parliamentary (let alone cabinet) experience.
In this scenario, Luxon would have his cake and eat it too. He’d technically rule Opportunity out of his coalition but talk it into supporting his minority government anyway.
In reality, it seems more likely Luxon doesn’t see this as a viable way forward, and views Opportunity as more like Labour’s Trojan Horse than a genuinely centrist kingmaker.
From that perspective, Opportunity’s job can be seen as vacuuming up votes in the centre and then supporting a Labour-led government; it might talk to National after the election as a courtesy, but that’s all.
Taking its bottom-line policies and public statements into account, then, it’s not unreasonable for voters to assume a vote for Opportunity is, in effect, a vote for a change of government.
Luxon’s refusal to work with Opportunity might seem illogical on the surface, but underneath it sits some valid reasoning. Of course, this may backfire once votes are counted and coalition negotiations are completed. But that’s politics.
Grant Duncan is a research associate with the Public Policy Institute at the University of Auckland Waipapa Taumata Rau.
This article was republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence.
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