Be careful what you wish for: The trouble with TOP
If Q is the answer, what is the question?
Actually, it’s not just one question. Qiulae Wong, known as Q, leader of the newly reinvented Opportunity Party (TOP), has pulled off a remarkable trick. She has successfully presented her party as the answer to every question. Whatever distresses you about politics today, the answer is: TOP.
You’re a greenie who wants a party that will work with National? TOP. You’re a libertarian disgusted by Act’s law-and-order numbskulls, and/or its climate deniers and gun lobbyists? TOP.
You want a high-wage economy but don’t think Labour has a clue how to achieve it? TOP. You want to honour the Treaty of Waitangi without honouring the nepotism of the Tamihere whanau? TOP. Maybe you support National but not when it extinguishes the pay-equity rights of women, or you want less poverty but not more government debt, or meaningful tax reform but not if it empowers Chloe Swarbrick: TOP.
And, most of all, if you want to put an end to the absurdity of 30 years of MMP in which we all vote and then Winston decides: TOP!
That’s the big one. Despair at the cynical gamesmanship of NZ First, and both National and Labour’s craven obeisance to it, has surely become the thing that unites more New Zealanders than anything else, probably including support for the All Blacks and a fondness for the buzzy bee.
But hang on. Why would TOP getting into parliament mean the end of the Power of Winston? A party that undermines NZ First will have to take votes from it to do so. But TOP won’t do that. It stands for tax reform, climate activism, social liberalism and expert-oriented managerialism. NZ First voters hate all that. TOP is about as pure an expression of anti-NZ Firstism as we’ve ever seen. It might draw votes from all the other parties, but not from Winston’s lot.
The sad fact is that votes for TOP won’t hurt him.
In judging the likelihood of TOP success, people point to precedents. But their significance is hard to read.
In Australia, for example, the Teals have done well – and TOP here has adopted the colour. But Australia is different: outright climate denialism on the centre-right there gave rise to Teal, but it’s different here. National’s blue-green voters might detest the gung-ho anti-environmentalism of Shane Jones and Simeon Brown, but are they really looking for a new home?
National’s blue-green voters might detest the gung-ho anti-environmentalism of Shane Jones and Simeon Brown, but are they really looking for a new home?
On the contrary, they may even have been heartened by National’s election-season burst of enviro-conscience: attacks on the conservation estate abandoned, new loans for residential solar, more wind farms being fast-tracked.
Another precedent: Colin Craig’s New Conservative Party polled 4.7% leading into the 2014 election, before finishing a shade under 4%. But it signifies little. Craig’s run was a vanity project at a time when voters had much more confidence in the mainstream parties. He appealed only to a fringe.
That’s not where TOP’s appeal comes from. These days, it’s almost as if National and Labour have conspired to undo our confidence in the mainstream, while NZ First has gathered much of the right-wing fringe to itself. So although TOP is riding a wave of discontent, it has little to do with conservative disgruntlement. It comes from everywhere else.
And in Wong, the party has a leader with far more charisma than the string of grumpy men who went before her. Never underestimate that: we want to like the people we vote for.
There’s another reason TOP appeals: it’s what the party itself calls “stop the division”. Everyone wants a functional health system, but very few people would say the war between National and Labour will help deliver it. TOP wants to change that.
Similarly, it’s obvious we need a bipartisan approach to long-term infrastructure planning, and the main parties even agree. But they don’t agree on what infra should be planned. National’s Ghost Roads of National Significance, unfunded and unfundable, have followed hard on Labour’s absurdly expensive Auckland Light Rail tunnels project. We can’t keep on like this and TOP wants to fix this too.
It’s just not all that clear how.
Where will TOP votes come from this election? Political advertising consultant Paul Gunson has done a deep dive into New Zealand Election Study (NZES) data and produced some fascinating results.
In 2017, the party drew mainly on former National and Green voters. Not Labour. In 2020, it appealed more to former Labour and National voters, but not much to Greens. Last election, in 2023, its voters came from Labour and the Greens, with few from National.
Get the picture? Hmm. One read of this shifting pattern is that TOP has always been a home for the non-fringe disillusioned, whatever the cause of their disappointment.
But Gunson also discovered a deeper trend: half of all people who identify as TOP voters want the Greens in government with them, and a third want Labour. Few want the current coalition parties back in government. In 2023, 66% of TOP voters identified themselves as left or centre-left. Only 12% said they were right or centre-right.
There’s a red flag for TOP in that data, because Wong says if TOP has the chance to negotiate a new government, it will do so with the party that gets the largest number of votes.
What if TOP gets into parliament on the strength of Labour defectors hoping to make it a viable partner for Labour, but this makes National the largest party? That would be Labour supporters sinking Labour’s vote and pushing TOP into National’s arms. (For that matter, the reverse could also happen.)
The lesson: tactical votes are dangerous, for the outcome and for the party in question. On this, there is ample precedent. In 2005 and again in 2017, NZ First went into government with Labour, making its conservative supporters so angry they abandoned the party at the next election, booting NZ First out of parliament altogether. The same fate befell the Māori Party in 2017 after it supported National. Parties that betray their voter base will be punished by those voters.
And yet there’s a lot of talk about voting tactically for TOP.
What if the party finds itself propping up National, without managing to win many concessions for doing so?
As for stopping Winston, how will that happen? Barring some extraordinary crisis, NZ First will be in the next parliament. And if the centre-right forms the next government, NZ First will almost certainly be in it: National and Act will be lucky to get to 40% combined; another 5% from TOP still wouldn’t be enough keep NZ First out.
We could end up with a National/Act/NZF/TOP coalition, which doesn’t seem like an outcome anybody wants.
What if TOP gets 4.9% and doesn’t win a seat? In a tight election, that would be a suicidal waste of around 140,000 votes: potentially enough to deny the centre-left the chance to form a government. That doesn’t seem like something most TOP voters would want either.
We could end up with a National/Act/NZF/TOP coalition, which doesn’t seem like an outcome anybody wants.
Perhaps the biggest question for TOP is how it will overcome the mismatch between what it wants to achieve and how it says it will go about it.
The plan to negotiate first with the largest party is ridiculous. TOP should focus on the parties it believes it could join in government in order to best advance its programme.
TOP knows our economy needs asset-tax reform of some kind, so why support parties that will veto such reforms? It wants more consensual and participatory approaches to decision-making, so why abandon this with parties that don’t agree?
These things are not nice-to-haves for TOP, they’re core issues. They should inform the party’s rallying cry and they should guide it in whatever negotiations it might pursue.
For TOP to do otherwise is to risk betraying its own voters.
This goes to the heart of why we vote, and the resurgence of TOP doesn’t change it. In my view, it comes down to this. You should vote for the party you believe in. That’s the way we get a parliament that represents the will of the people.
If you want tax reform, poverty taken seriously and the same for the climate crisis, vote for a party that wants the same. TOP might qualify. If you want a stronger democracy, an economy dedicated to the needs of the great majority and not the greed of a few, vote for these things. TOP still might qualify. But National, Act and NZ First don’t. If you want the malign influences of David Seymour, Simeon Brown and Winston Peters consigned to history, vote for a party that is committed to doing it. Not one that might keep them in power.
Party vote for the party that wants what you want.
It’s only when everyone who wants these things votes for them that progressive parties win a majority of votes and get to form a government.
Party vote, that is. Party votes determine the outcome. Don’t give your electorate vote to your heart’s desire and do something tricksy with your party vote.
Party vote for the party that wants what you want.
This post is the third and final part in a series on election choices. Part 1 looked at the idea of a grand NatLab coalition and part 2 explained why I was voting Green. I’m not impartial and I confess the post above should be read in that light.
"Party vote for the party that wants what you want."
Oh,dear lord, the number of times in the late 90s and early 00s I've heard a person tell me they wanted good social services, free (to user) healthcare, free (to user) education, etc, only to tell me in the next breath that instead of voting for the Alliance (which was strong on those issues), they voted NZ First!
Someone point me to a brick wall so I can bang my head against it!!
Perhaps that's why NZers are so frustrated with politics: we want one thing, then vote for something else.
Has anyone ever gone to a supermarket wanting a can of peaches; inextricably buying a can of beans instead; opening it up at home and being disappointed it wasn't peaches? Yeah, me neither.
But that's how a good chunk of people seem to vote.
And then we don't allow 16 year olds to vote because... *ahem* ... they might not understand what they're doing.
I emailed TOP asking about their health and safety policy when the awful Brooke bill was going through the House. I got a reply saying they would get back to me and it could take a while because all their policy team are volunteers. Still waiting. I agree Q is charismatic, but they have a very corporate top down structure - look up how their candidates are selected and policy decided. All in the hands of an unelected "Board". As you say, careful what you wish for, especially if you want to change the government.