Who’s afraid of the Opportunity Party?
The wasted-vote whisper is back — and this time it comes from the moderator’s chair.
Two weeks from polling day, the oldest trick in MMP is back on air.
On Thursday morning, Newstalk ZB’s Ryan Bridge predicted that Opportunity would not reach five percent. He conceded the call was not based on any scientific poll. It was a gut feeling about how voters behave once they are in the booth.
The night before, Bridge had moderated the NZ Herald’s Powerbrokers’ Debate, with Opportunity leader Qiulae Wong at the lectern. Earlier in the campaign he told listeners that voters “take out insurance” in the polling booth. A week earlier, he quizzed Christopher Luxon on Opportunity as moderator of the Herald’s leaders’ debate.
A moderator should not be handicapping one of his contestants. That is not analysis. It is the wasted-vote play: tell voters a party will fail until they make sure it does. If he cannot keep his gut to himself, he should not be in the chair.
Parties have run this line for decades. National has been warning its former voters that a vote for Opportunity may be wasted. When a party says it, voters hear spin. When a broadcaster says it, it sounds like news.
The gut is out of step with the data. Opportunity sits on 7 percent in the latest 1News–Verian poll, 5.5 in RNZ–Reid Research, 6.5 with Roy Morgan and 5.4 for The Post–Freshwater.
The odd one out is the Taxpayers’ Union–Curia poll, which has had the party below the line two months running — 4.8 percent in October — and which the Herald reports alongside the rest.
Curia’s director, David Farrar, co-founded the Taxpayers’ Union. His firm also polls for National, and left the Research Association in 2024 while a complaint against it was under way. I have written before about how its numbers land just as rival pollsters start dialling.
The Taxpayers’ Union network has an obvious preference: ACT and New Zealand First holding the balance of power, with its people at the table the morning after the election. Opportunity, whose leader says she would not have signed the current coalition deals, is in the way.
The arithmetic rewards the bullying. Every vote for a party that misses five percent is redistributed to the parties that clear it. In 2020, 225,190 such votes were handed on, helping Labour to an outright majority on half the vote. Talk Opportunity under the line and its supporters’ votes become a bonus for everyone else.
The club wrote those rules. I argued in 2013 that politicians abuse MMP’s flaws. No new party has yet entered Parliament under MMP without a sitting MP on its list. The threshold keeps it that way.
Bridge is not alone on his network. Mike Hosking declared that Phillip Mills had wasted his donation because Opportunity “will not make it”, then complained that the party was the media’s darling. Heather du Plessis-Allan suggested it may have “peaked too soon”.
All three broadcast on NZME’s Newstalk ZB. NZME also owns the Herald, which staged the debates Bridge moderated and publishes the Curia numbers every month.
I have watched this before. In 2005, the pundits wrote Rodney Hide off in Epsom. A Roy Morgan poll put Hide ahead, 39 percent to 33; ACT complained that the media ignored it. Hide won by 3,102 votes. I documented how that game is played in Unleashed.
A prediction dressed as commentary is a vote cast in someone else’s name.
I drafted a bill to regulate polling, criminalise fabricated polls and scrap the threshold, and another to outlaw astroturfing and corrupt conduct, such as media hitjobs designed to unduly influence an election. Both sit unused on politicians’ desks.
Until they pass, the most dangerous thing in this election is not a rogue poll. It is a confident voice with a big microphone, making unscientific calls that suit interests nobody has to declare.
On 7 November, vote for what you want — not for what a broadcaster’s gut says everyone else will do.
