An awkward arranged marriage: The data that shows just how much the coalition disagrees

Sunday, 14 September 2025

ANALYSIS: It doesn’t take much of a political antenna to see just how much the coalition disagrees on.

In the last week, Associate Energy Minister Shane Jones floated the idea of nationalising our electricity generators, a policy far too left wing for Chris Hipkins’ Labour Party. ACT and NZ First squabbled over whose idea it was to have a “values pledge” for new migrants, first while the Prime Minister dismissed the idea. All this in public, in Government, and in a reasonably quiet week.

But these clashes between party leaders are just the tips of the three vast icebergs that are National, ACT, and NZ First. Each party leader represents a group of voters with completely different views and priorities to the others - particularly NZ First’s.

It is of course normal for coalition parties to disagree. If they agreed on everything they’d all be one party. But on current polling and current antipathies it looks like the only hope of returning to Government next year is as this exact coalition, meaning this carefully arranged one-term marriage may well be extended out for another three years.

As we near that campaign season each party will gain sharper elbows, and look to define itself more strongly against the other, both retaining their core vote from 2023 and growing it.

Party strategists will be researching what both these voters look like and want from their parties. Much of this will be with private polling and focus groups the wider public and media will never see. But some of will come from the New Zealand Election Study (NZES), a giant survey undertaken after every election and released in recent weeks. And with this survey data we can work out just how different the existing voters for each of the coalition parties are.

Two women and a rich man

Before we dive into the attitudes of each voter group, it is worth taking a look at who they are outside of politics.

The average National voter at the 2023 election was a 54-year-old woman. She lived in a house she owned in a major urban area, with a household income of around $116,000, and she had some level of post high school education.

The average NZ First voter was unsurprisingly a bit older - 59 - while ACT’s voters skewed younger at 48. Despite common perceptions of NZ First as a bit of a boy’s club, they had about as many votes from women as men. But her household income was far lower - about $75,000, and she was more likely to live rurally.

Meanwhile, the average ACT voter was a man, and made even more than the National voter - around $120,000 in household income. Just one in five NZ First voters lived in a household earning more than $123,000 a year, while almost half of ACT voters did.

The further you go into the data, the more you will see a consistent pattern - ACT and National voters are not wildly different from each other, but NZ First voters are often quite different. A big example of this trend, and one that was very relevant in the leadup to the 2023 election, was COVID vaccinations.

Over 90% of all National and ACT voters were vaccinated at least once against the Coronavirus, but 26% of NZ First voters did not have a single shot. Peters visited the Parliament occupation - and it worked for him. Not all of his voters or even a majority of them were against the pandemic response - but a decent chunk were.

Taking from the left

The vaccination data and Peters’ decision to rule out Labour might suggest a voter base drawn entirely from the right. But NZ First have a long history of winning some left-wing support and that was on display in 2023.

Very few NZ First voters actually place themselves on the “left” when given a scale - with the vast majority putting themselves in the centre or the centre-right. But half of them had voted for Labour in 2020, and 21% of them in 2023 said they wanted Labour to lead the Government, despite voting for NZ First who had ruled them out.

You can also see this substantial minority of left-leaning NZ FIrst voters when asking about party leaders or issues. About a fifth of NZ First voters gave both Christopher Luxon and David Seymour the lowest possible rating for a political leader - 0 out of 10 - and a similar proportion “strongly” agree with the idea of the Government working to reduce income differences between different groups. Perhaps this is unsurprising given how much less money the typical NZ First voter brings in.

But the coalition has two other parties in it and their voters are not uniform either. National voters are substantially more likely than ACT voters to see some role for the Government in reducing income differences.

And on issues like immigration you could generally place National and ACT voters much closer to the cosmopolitan left. Just 19% of National voters think being born in New Zealand is “very important” to being a “true” New Zealander - compared to a huge 37% of NZ First voters.

This makes Peters’ decision to rail against mass immigration and call for a values statement for new citizens over the weekend unsurprising. It also throws into stark relief that ACT’s similar push in this vein - Brooke van Velden said she was already working on one - is very much about winning new NZ First voters.

There are also issues where the parties generally agree, things the coalition will love talking about as a team - like law and order. A supermajority of the voters for all three parties think there should be “stiffer sentences” for lawbreakers. This is essentially comfort food for this arranged marriage, a single meal they can all sit down and enjoy together.

Money money money

National’s stated purpose upon election was to “get New Zealand back on track” by reining in Government spending and consequently getting inflation down.

ACT would generally like National go a lot further and faster on this. On Budget Day this year Seymour made clear that the Government was “spending more than ACT would”. NZ First are also happy to talk up fiscal prudence, but don’t see cuts as a moral good in the same way Seymour does.

Funnily enough, majorities of all three parties in the coalition actually wanted the Government to spend more on both health and education - even ACT voters. But it is easy to support more spending in a vacuum, and if you ask voters to make a trade off between paying down debt faster and spending more on public services you get a different picture.

Here we can see a real shift in priorities, with almost no NZ First voters accepting service cuts to pay off public debt, and close to a majority placing themselves are far away from that position as possible.

As an election year budget approaches this tension within the coalition will only heighten. It is easy for NZ First to promise a policy like compulsory KiwiSaver with no real costings right now, but if their support is crucial to Nicola Willis remaining Finance Minister next December the questions might get quite a lot more pointed. For now the marriage continues.

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