‘There is a risk’: Labour warns left-leaning voters over party nearing 5%

Tuesday, 14 July 2026

Labour leader Chris Hipkins and Opportunity leader Qiulae Wong.

The fledgling Opportunity Party hit 4.7% in the latest RNZ Reid-Research poll, placing it just under the 5% threshold required to enter Parliament.

The poll shows a dead heat between the major political blocs, projecting 61 seats for the current National-ACT-NZ First coalition and 59 seats for the Labour-Green-Te Pāti Māori opposition.

Opportunity Party leader Qiulae Wong has positioned herself as a potential kingmaker who is willing to work with either major party if the threshold is crossed on election day.

Labour leader Chris Hipkins warns left-leaning voters that backing Opportunity carries the risk of a wasted vote that could ultimately help return the centre-right coalition to power.

Labour leader Chris Hipkins says “it’s still very early days” to consider speaking with Opportunity, and urged left-leaning voters to consider their vote carefully, after the fledgling party came close to the 5% threshold to enter Parliament in the latest political poll.

The RNZ Reid-Research poll, released on Tuesday, showed the centre-left bloc and centre-right bloc neck and neck, with the coalition projected to return to power on the narrowest of margins - 61 seats for National, ACT and NZ First, and 59 seats for Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori.

But the make-up of Parliament would shift dramatically if the Opportunity Party’s poll result of 4.7% increased slightly on election day, and they crossed the threshold. The party’s leader, Qiulae Wong, has modelled herself as a kingmaker willing to work with either major party.

It was the second poll to show Opportunity just shy of 5%, after last month’s 1News Verian poll saw the party score a result of 4.6%. That was their highest ever poll result, until the RNZ numbers were released on Tuesday.

(Note: Hey, we made a mistake in building the first version of this poll. It has now been fixed but we need to start over.)

‘There is a risk’

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon speaks with media about the latest 1News Verian poll result, on 24 June, 2026.

Hipkins told TVNZ on Tuesday morning that Opportunity still had “a very, very steep hill ahead of them to climb, to get over the 5% threshold in an actual election campaign,” and - like National leader Christopher Luxon - raised the possibility that people voting for the party could be disappointed by the end result.

“There is a risk, for those who want to see a change of government … by voting for the Opportunities Party, there’s two risks to that. One is they could find that if Opportunities Party get into Parliament, that they support a National government,” he said.

“The second risk is that they won’t get to the threshold and that vote will be wasted and that potentially helps the parties on the other side of the aisle get back into government again.”

When a party fails to win an electorate or get more than 5% of the party vote, its “wasted vote” is effectively divvied up between the parties that did make it to Parliament.

The RNZ poll showed Chris Hipkins four percentage points ahead of Christopher Luxon in the preferred PM stakes.

Tuesday’s RNZ-Reid Research poll showed respondents who said they would vote for Opportunity much preferred a Labour-led government, at 41.1%, than a National-led one, at 21.3%.

But Wong told RNZ the clear preference among the party’s voters “doesn’t drive our decision-making,” and Opportunity would go to the election explicitly pitching itself as a party capable of working with either Labour or National.

The Opportunity Party, led by Qiulae Wong, has aspirations of being the “kingmaker” after November’s election.

Hipkins said November’s election was going to be “very, very close,” and Labour had a lot of work ahead if it wanted to oust the coalition.

“Labour’s relatively consistently the biggest party” across all polling, Hipkins said, but “the election is going to be very, very close and anything can happen”.

RNZ Reid-Research poll party vote:

Labour: 34%, down 1.6 points since the previous poll in March
National: 28.7%, down 2.1 points
NZ First: 11.5%, up 0.9 points
The Greens: 10.3%, up 0.2 points
ACT: 7.8%, up 0.8 points
Opportunity: 4.7%, up 2.7 points
Te Pāti Māori: 2.3%, down 0.9 points

RNZ Reid-Research poll preferred PM ratings:

Chris Hipkins: 23.9%, up 3.2 points
Christopher Luxon: 20%, up 2.7 points
Winston Peters: 13.2%, up 0.1 points

What happens if Opportunity clears 5%

Wong has a plan for November 8, the day after the election, if it turns out she is bound for Parliament.

She told Stuff last month she would pick up the phone to call the leader of the party with the biggest share of the vote.

“We will go to that bigger party. We will push for our key policies which we think are the most important to take into a coalition,” she said.

Wong said Opportunity would enter into a period of exclusive negotiations with the largest party, about forming the next government. Only if those negotiations look to fail or stall would she then start talking to the other side.

“That’s the right thing to do, to give that first negotiation the genuine space that it requires to see whether some good common ground can be reached,” she said.

Ahead of the election, Wong said she would outline her party’s “bottom lines” for coalition negotiations. These would be policies and “values” which she said the party would demand from negotiations.