Back pedalling to the centre: National’s pragmatic pivot three months from election day
Sunday, 28 June 2026
Vernon Small is a former labour government adviser and journalist.
OPINION: The final quarter countdown starts now.
Three months to pass laws before the House rises and politicians fan out across the country to campaign for the November 7 election.
And less than three months for some rapid legislative back-pedalling, if the past few weeks are any guide.
The polls are not drop-dead desperate for the Coalition – though less than rosy for National.
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As they have for months now, most surveys are suggesting a Chris-each-way bet as to who will lead the next Government.
Last week’s 1News-Verian poll was not as bleak for the incumbents as the initial headlines might have suggested. Labour was down 5 percentage points – by far the biggest shift. And one strain of analysis that put the Opposition on the Treasury benches by 64 seats to 60 included a beyond-heroic assumption that Te Pāti Māori would win six electorates (when it only clearly controls four now) and create a four-seat overhang.
With the party in disarray, and Labour (and probably the Greens too) likely resurgent among Māori voters, a better reading would assume TPM wins three or four seats, giving the narrowest of margins and even a Left-Right tie.
But even on this more benign reading of the numbers, there were significant warning signs for National as it moves to burnish its appeal to undecided and centrist voters.
It was the first time since 2021 that the party has been under 30% in this poll, which has a reputation for being kinder to National.
Was it revenge, old-warhorse-instinct or something more concrete that prompted Winston Peters to query how a “desperate” National campaign manager Simeon Brown would respond “when they’re sliding towards 25% in the polls”?
On top of that, the “can’t or won’t say” voters were at 14%, up 5 points, and the Opportunity Party ticked up to just below the 5% threshold.
That suggests about one in six centrish voters are now parked up, or shopping around, and open to persuasion.
Whether it is in reaction to recent polls, or not, National is clearly taking a more pragmatic stance as it tries to appeal to those centre voters – though not necessarily the same ones NZ First has been so successfully harvesting.
With the obvious exception of its Road to KiwiSaver conversion, National’s policy and tonal shift has largely been towards the environmental middle – the voters (female? especially in Auckland?) with lower-case “g” green sympathies.
It started early this year with National’s Conservation Minister Tama Potaka promising that post-election, it would reinstate commercial fishing bans in Hauraki Gulf areas that had just been opened by the Government.
It has flowed through a rethink of the controversial Fisheries Amendment Bill – which is now in for a full panel-beating that will extend beyond the election – and on to this week’s move to scrap clauses in the Conservation Amendment Bill that would open large swathes of the DOC estate to sale or exchange.
There is no way that 60% of the estate was being earmarked for sale but opening the door so wide was a blunder; a legislative sledgehammer to crack a nut if the aim was, as claimed, to divest a borstal here, a Met office there and a gravel pit or two down south.
It remains to be seen whether the equally significant provision in the Bill to allow economic development on the DOC estate “to the highest extent practicable” will survive the rethink. Ministers have so far been reticent on that score, and NZ First’s Shane Jones is still keen. But while some commercial operations, such as for existing tourist concessions, are acceptable to most, allowing more mining and other extractive industries risks the same level of public angst as the blanket-asset-sale option.
The announcement this week of cheap loans to install solar power comes from the same stable of blue-green measures.
For a mere $7 million in capital funding (the remaining 80% to be provided by councils and the local authority funding agency) National has adopted a widely supported policy while providing some medium-term cost-of-living relief to households facing high and rising energy bills - and large capital costs if they go solar.
At the same time, it has taken some of the sting out of an inevitable Labour plan to roll out rooftop solar.
It begs the question whether there are other areas National will bend on before the campaign proper begins.
One obvious one would be the contentious health and safety reform championed by Act deputy leader Brooke Van Velden. NZ First has already pledged to “fix it” after the election because it would lead to increased death and injury. Business is not unified behind it by any means, the union movement is implacably opposed as are all the Opposition parties, and for Pike River families it is a betrayal of workplace changes made in response to their loss.
On a tightly contested campaign trail, when you are already under pressure to match the Opposition on cost-of-living measures, there are some things you just don't need to be defending.