Brainwaves: Time to modernise the institution of the opposition
Sunday, 26 July 2026
The terms ‘opposition' or 'leader of the opposition' get used constantly in political commentary, yet almost nobody explains what the institution actually is, or whether it still works the way it should. Dr Michael Swanson, of the University of Otago – Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka, set out to rectify that and proposes reform.
Are the formal rules governing New Zealand's parliamentary opposition still fit for purpose in an MMP environment?
Given it is an election year, it’s a timely question, but my interest in this topic started a few years ago after several years working in Wellington. For most of that time I assumed the way Parliament operated was simply how it needed to operate, built according to an adversarial, two-party logic.
It wasn't until after the 2020 election that I started questioning that assumption. Why is the opposition still talked about as the assumed heir to government, as though there are only two parties in play?
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In late 2020 and early 2021, National's polling dropped into the low 20s while ACT climbed into the high teens. That raised a genuine question: if public support shifts far enough, can one party still legitimately call itself 'the' opposition?
From there, my questions multiplied.
Why does the leader of the opposition receive a salary comparable to a cabinet minister? Why are they guaranteed seats on committees and boards that other party leaders outside government are not? Despite nearly 30 years of MMP, the institution of the opposition still looked stuck in the first-past-the-post era.
I found that the core problem is one of path dependency. Much of what defines 'the opposition' today, its roles, its resourcing, its assumed status, was built for a two-party system that New Zealand started to move away from in the 1990s.
The shift to MMP should have prompted a genuine redesign of these institutions. Instead, the changes made were incremental, and incremental change simply hasn't kept pace with how much the party system itself has transformed.
To test this, I assessed the opposition against six functions essential to a fit-for-purpose institution in a liberal democracy: scrutiny, accountability, representation, proportionality, alternative policy contestation, and legitimacy-building.
Measured against those criteria, New Zealand's opposition falls short. Parliament has become genuinely more diverse, with more parties holding real influence, but the formal architecture around opposition, who gets resourced, who gets a formal office, who gets guaranteed committee seats, still behaves as though only one party outside the governing one matters.
This isn't a small technical issue. The opposition's job is to hold government to account, scrutinise policy, and offer the public a credible alternative. It is meant to be both a watchdog and a government-in-waiting. When its formal rules concentrate power, salary, and status in a single office, rather than distributing it across the full range of parties actually opposing the government, that job gets harder to do well, and the public's ability to see genuine political contestation gets weaker.
My thesis sets out a series of reforms aimed at closing that gap: redistributing the leader of the opposition's resourcing and responsibilities proportionally across opposition parties, reorienting select committees away from executive dominance, tightening the use of parliamentary urgency, and restructuring Question Time so it functions as genuine scrutiny rather than a partisan stage.
None of these are radical departures from New Zealand's Westminster inheritance. They are attempts to bring inherited structures into line with the multi-party reality Parliament has operated in for nearly 30 years.
Real reform will require political will, and I'm under no illusion this will be difficult to generate, particularly around a role as entrenched as the leader of the opposition. Early conversations with people who work in and around Parliament confirmed as much: the logic of these changes is rarely disputed, but the politics of unwinding an established office is another matter entirely.
If New Zealand wants a Parliament that genuinely reflects the pluralism voters have chosen since 1996, the institution built to hold government to account needs to catch up with the system it now sits inside. Otherwise, we're left with a watchdog still wearing a two-party collar, in a parliament that has long since moved on.
Professor Janine Hayward and Dr Christopher Rudd were Michael Swanson’s co-supervisors.