Will tired, stale Labour seize this Opportunity?

Thursday, 2 July 2026

Janet Wilson is a regular opinion contributor and a freelance journalist who has also worked in communications, including with the National Party.

OPINION: If Chris Hipkins was hoping for a vibe-shift to propel him into power in the wake of last weekend’s annual Labour congress he was sorely mistaken.

Even the 1News-Verian poll a week earlier, noting Labour’s 5-point plunge from 37% to 32%, wasn’t enough to jolt him out of his party’s tightly proscribed creeping incrementalism with the roll-out of the extension of the Apprenticeship Boost scheme, a retread from the 2023 congress.

And while the devoted membership cheered wildly at Chippie’s “New Zealand is broken” speech, just as National’s equally ardent members did to Luxon three years earlier, Labour and its leader clearly have no plans to fix it.

Or, if they do, they’re not telling voters until later, and possibly not until they win the election. Which places a whole new meaning on “trust us” and hubris’ debilitating role in politics.

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As other members of the punditry have rightly pointed out, the lessons of failed UK leader Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party should have cast a pall over this year’s congress.

Instead, behind the thinly veiled razzamatazz lay a party basking in the false confidence that being the most popular affords it. A popularity that’s largely been achieved from an exasperated electorate fed-up with the coalition Government, instead of an Opposition acting as a government-in-waiting.

It’s only one poll, with many more due before November 7, but with only three points separating the major parties, the difference in policy roll-out is striking. It may be a measure of National’s desperation but a sharp U-turn on decades of KiwiSaver policy, making it compulsory and adding in a host of other provisions from newborns to 65-year-olds, got the country’s tongues wagging for days. It’s the kind of structural reform that its critics have cried out for and, although not reflected in this polling, is the epitome of the saying, “good policy equals good politics”.

Meanwhile Labour’s policy platform is cautiously aimed at its middle class voters. And while policies such as a $20 public transport fare cap, free doctor visits, prescriptions, maternity scans and cervical screenings are worthy, they’ll hardly set the electorate alight or go anywhere close to changing the structural issues the party claims they care about, such as poverty and inequality.

Because what the 1New-Verian poll may have proved is that status quo bias, the tendency for voters to stick with known parties over unproven alternatives, is being challenged.

You can attribute Opportunity’s rise to within a whisper of the 5% threshold to several factors, starting with an electorate that continues to do it hard with rising poverty levels and inequity. Then there’s the quiet rise of Gen Z and the Millennials forcing a change in values, and fighting wholesale dissatisfaction with the status quo.

At 4.6% in this poll Opportunity may have morphed in undecided voters’ minds from “it’s a wasted vote” to “they’re in with a chance, maybe I’ll join the movement”, meaning parts of their narrative deserve closer examination because its leader, Qiulae Wong, wants Opportunity to replace NZ First as the country’s kingmaker.

Wong eschews labelling Opportunity as “right” or “left”, designating the party as a centrist one which can work with anyone, but many of its policy settings belong with the left bloc. Sure, its superannuation policy closely aligns with National’s KiwiSaver Policy, but no right-wing party would ever endorse the prospect of a universal income or a 1.75% annual land tax.

But whether you agree with them or not, what Opportunity has in spades is a Seek-recruited leader straight out of central casting armed with a slew of policies that an electorate hungry for new ideas will consider and be damned what label political junkies put on them.

As to the contention from right-wing commentators such as Ani O’Brien and David Farrar that it’s the media that’s created Opportunity’s rise, consider this: stories only stick around if there are sufficient reader eyeballs that remain on them. If the analytical winds of fortune weren’t at Opportunity’s back it would have been lucky to have one story survive the news cycle.

What’s more, Opportunity isn’t there yet. There’s the Rubicon of 5%to cross before Qiulae and her colleagues are swept into Parliament. But there’s another way that could happen - if Aotearoa’s most popular political party, Labour, had either the courage or conviction and was prepared to do an Epsom-style deal in Mt Albert, where Wong is standing as Opportunity’s electorate candidate.

With Labour’s Helen White only squeaking in by 18 votes in the once solid-red seat last election, a deal to help Opportunity into Parliament would mean that Hipkins could afford to ignore the dynastic schism besetting Te Pāti Māori and transcend Labour’s stale, tired, small “c” conservatism while basking in the reflected glow of Opportunity’s shiny newness.

But who the hell are we kidding? That would entail Labour taking the kind of bold risk that could get them elected.

And under Hipkins that’s just not going to happen.