Opportunity is filling a housing hole Labour can’t
Saturday, 11 July 2026
Henry Cooke is The Post’s political editor.
OPINION: Whenever the party formerly known as TOP come up, pundits face a choice.
They can either describe the party in the way Opportunity would like to be described - as sensible centrists happy to work with either side to take New Zealand forward - or they can describe the party based on its major policy platform, which envisions a 15% correction in the housing market through a land value tax, which then pays for a universal basic income.
This is a policy far more disruptive to the status quo than anything the Greens are promoting and would have the impact of massively transferring wealth from older, richer Kiwis to the young. Retirees currently planning to do that very transfer via inheritance would instead do it via the state by slowly selling off the equity in their home before death.
It is hard to tease out how much of Opportunity's seeming rise - depending on the poll you read - comes through this policy, versus how much comes from the fact it has a telegenic leader in a political environment drastically devoid of charisma. But it is certainly some part of it.
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Opportunity's housing policy will of course never approach real popularity. Even if a huge swathe of homeowners would be better off via the universal basic income, the whole prospect of taxing land this way remains alien to the political mainstream. Kiwis don’t mind a tax on something that flows, like an income stream or the proceeds of sale of an investment property, but taxing something that simply sits still like a villa in Ponsonby is quite a different prospect. Just 12% of people in the latest The Post/Freshwater poll disagreed with the statement, “Older New Zealanders worked hard for what they have and shouldn't be penalised to help younger generations”.
But plenty of policies aren’t majority popular. And Opportunity are swarming into a gap others are finding it difficult to credibly fill.
That gap was once broadly owned by Labour and the Greens. Ahead of the 2017 election as housing costs continued a years-long march and National politicians ummed and ahhed about whether it could really be called a “crisis”, Labour finally found an issue it could really stick to the Fifth National Government. Diatribes about young people just needing to save more and the voting down of a member’s bill on rental standards added fuel to the fire.
KiwiBuild was not a very coherent answer to this housing crisis, but it did at least speak to a growing class of young people whose savings for a deposit fell behind the amount needed by more every week. Labour’s Phil Twyford failed to make KiwiBuild work, but Labour did plenty else in housing that was effective. Healthy Homes Standards in rentals have genuinely lifted the quality of rentals across the country, with a recent survey finding around 70% of insulated rentals had that insulation installed in the last decade.
Kāinga Ora began a build programme of huge ambition that saw around 9200 new state homes (net) added between mid-2017 and mid-2024. And most importantly, Twyford changed zoning rules to make it far harder for cities to stop new houses through the National Policy Statement on Urban Development - a project Chris Bishop is attempting to carry through to this day.
But the coherent bits of Labour’s housing plan did not arrest house price growth. Indeed, the monetary policy stimulus during the pandemic led to a property prices boom like no other, one helped by the fact Labour had promised ahead of the 2020 election it would never tax any of this gain.
Young voters were still locked out of the housing market - were in fact further behind - despite the stated goal of the Government to fix it. It seemed the only thing worse than a government not admitting to there being a housing crisis was one that it did admit but didn’t do enough to stop it getting worse.
Which leads us to the current term, where things are quite topsy turvy. National, traditionally seen as the party of property ownership and stable housing growth, is presiding over a real correction. The party is awkward about boasting about this because its beneficiaries (the young and the property-less) are generally not likely to be National voters while some of those it is harming might be.
It doesn’t help that some of the downturn in property prices is due not to plentiful new supply - although that definitely is a factor - but to a general slackening of demand as Kiwis leave and incomes stagnate.
Bishop may have kind of said that house prices should go down at one point last year, but he’s not out there repeating this ad nauseam.
Labour, meanwhile, has not grasped the housing nettle either, even if “homes” is one of its three campaign pledges.
The party is now committed to taxing some form of property wealth, but has excluded the family home, which makes up 66% of residential property. Its MPs have also made promises based on the proceeds of said tax, promises that are dependent on property prices ending their decline and starting to rise again. And so we return to the strange dance of Labour politicians saying they want houses to be more affordable but not saying they want house prices to actually fall, and designing a policy that will only get more revenue if prices rise.
This reticence is understandable - a lot of obtainable voters own homes, and those who bought at the top of the market are understandably worried about further falls - but it leaves a lot on the table. Labour has also found itself in the strange position of promising a cut to the accommodation supplement - needed if it wants to cancel the Government’s hike of state house rents.
The party has had some success in harnessing the resentment many voters feel towards landlords, branding the re-introduction of interest deductibility for them as a “landlord tax cut”, but there is clearly space on housing to the left.
To Labour’s left is the Green Party, which is keener on a wealth tax and inheritance tax - but also excluding the family home! The reasons for this are understandable, as the Greens still rely on many voters who either have a family home or might inherit part of one one day, but it again leaves space. Te Pāti Māori has a three bullet-point, detail-free housing policy - the paragraph this sentence is within is three times longer.
Which brings us to Opportunity, the only party currently calling for serious taxation of the family home, for house prices to fall, and to use this change as a hinge to reorient the entire economy.
It is entirely unclear how many people this will force to switch parties. There are probably plenty of voters rusted on to Labour or the Greens who wouldn’t mind something a bit more radical in this area but who will not risk a wasted vote, and will certainly not risk a party that would keep Christopher Luxon on the ninth floor.
But politicians of all stripes should not underestimate the pure resentment that the current housing settings have created among a group of voters. It is these voters who phrases like the “landlord tax cut” speak to very strongly.
Wherever they look around the economy, they see a boomer-reich that is wilfully blind to how easy they have had it and how much they have pulled up the ladder behind them. They see pundits on the news talk about the need for the housing market to grow like this is an uncontroversial good. They see colleagues and friends their age who get a leg up from their parents enter a level of wealth and security they can’t quite imagine.
This group of voters is nowhere near a majority and the recent increased affordability of homes has probably shrunk it somewhat. But it is not going anywhere. It will be a force in our politics for many elections to come - Opportunity or not.