Any day now the June Curia-Taxpayers Union political poll will be released. It’s less than five months to the 2026 election, the time that polling numbers start to matter.
Last month a party which rebranded as Opportunity (formerly The Opportunities Party or TOP) scored 2.8 percent in the Curia-TU poll. In April Opportunity cracked through to 3.3 percent in the 1 News Verian survey.
For a party with a seriously low profile since the departure of founder Gareth Morgan those figures in themselves are quite astounding. But the real eyebrow raiser was the Roy Morgan result released just after Kings Birthday which gave Opportunity an astounding 6 percent.
When the June Curia-TU result is out in the middle of this month there will be extraordinary interest to see if this party with unknown personnel and Marxist redistributive policy can crack the 5 percent threshold again.
If it does then it positions New Zealand as an outlier in the western hemisphere as political movements of the right elsewhere (One Nation in Australia, Reform in Britain and Rassamblement National in France) surge into positions of strength. Our political ascendant is coming from the other direction.
Because despite their photogenic leader Qiulae Wong’s assertions they could coalesce with both Labour and National, no party of the centre right or right could possibly entertain this bunch of highly educated millennial urban liberals, many of whom were born and sometimes educated overseas.
Their key policy is a reshaping of the tax system. Apparently we don’t have enough breadth and variety in our sources of tax. We only tax income, company profits, consumption and services and just for good measure we slap excise and levies on a variety of substances and services like fuel, vehicles, alcohol and tobacco.
All that means the government collected $172 billion dollars last fiscal year. The problem was they spent $183 billion, much of it inefficiently.
But Opportunity doesn’t think that’s enough. Too many people have too much property and it’s worth too much. So they intend to sting an annual 1.75 percent on all urban property values and 0.5 percent each year on rural land.
If you own a million dollar property – and let’s face it, they’re as common as muck these days - you’ll be stung $17,500 a year in land tax. Oh, you still have to pay rates and insurance on it. There’s no exemption for the family home.
But if you’re retired and have no income you can defer until you pop off and your estate will be slugged as many years as you haven’t paid. Therefore if you’re 70, have little income apart from superannuation and can’t pay the tax on your million dollar house each year but go on living till you’re 90, your beneficiaries will see $350,000 taken out of the estate.
Great eh?
If your farm is worth $3 million, a not uncommon valuation, the annual tax bill will be $15,000. Let’s hope those high meat and milk prices stay.
But do not fret. In return for having an extravagant tax bill, Opportunity want to give you a Citizens Income of $400 a week. That’s everyone. Millionaires to paupers and everybody in between. What’s more there’ll be no forms to fill in, it won’t be taxed and it’ll mean up to two thousand jobs can be done away with at MSD and those people can then move to more productive jobs!
Seriously, this is what Ms Wong told RNZ’s Guyon Espiner.
Even the Opportunity leader admits that property values could reduce at least 10 percent with this policy. That’s OK because more people will be able to afford to buy them.
A land tax, she says, will raise $28 billion. Of that $24 billion will be paid out in the Citizen’s Income.
Why doesn’t she do another rebrand and just call it the Robin Hood Party? Taking from the (sort of) rich and giving to the poor, or rather those who don’t own property. As Ms Wong stated on RNZ, some high earning individuals who don’t own property will effectively get a tax cut because if you’re making $150,000 a year but don’t own a house, Opportunity will slip you another $400 a week just to make it easier to make the rent.
Dear me.
It gets worse. She wants ALL public transport free (eat that Labour), wants to triple renewable energy resources but won’t specify what kind or who’s paying, and just to make a farmer’s day, wants to add agricultural emissions to the ETS.
Oh, and they want to initiate Citizens Assemblies to discuss issues and make recommendations to parliament. Why bother with elected representatives then?
They have identified 43 candidates so far, all of them standing in electorate seats. The party list shows Qiulae Wong at 1, Daniel Eb is number 2 and Kayla Kingdon-Bebb at 3. They were born in Fiji, South Africa and Canada.
Daniel Eb is a farmer from Kaipara and the Opportunity Deputy Leader. Kayla Kingdon-Bebb is “an environmental policy leader” who is CEO of WWF, the World Wildlife Fund.
Oh, and she was one of the co-authors of He Puapua, the Nania Mahuta requested action plan to achieve the goals of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Say no more.
.Qiulae Wong says Opportunity is starting its policy from evidence rather than ideology.
This seventy-something property owning superannuitant can’t quite rationalise that.
Sadly the Opportunity polling trajectory says they could be part of any Labour led coalition government.
National surely wouldn’t touch them with a long and very slippery barge pole would they?
But if we look on the bright side, Te Pati Maori would be on the cross benches.
Peter Williams was a writer and broadcaster for half a century. Now watching from the sidelines. Peter blogs regularly on Peter’s Substack where this article was sourced.
When the June Curia-TU result is out in the middle of this month there will be extraordinary interest to see if this party with unknown personnel and Marxist redistributive policy can crack the 5 percent threshold again.
If it does then it positions New Zealand as an outlier in the western hemisphere as political movements of the right elsewhere (One Nation in Australia, Reform in Britain and Rassamblement National in France) surge into positions of strength. Our political ascendant is coming from the other direction.
Because despite their photogenic leader Qiulae Wong’s assertions they could coalesce with both Labour and National, no party of the centre right or right could possibly entertain this bunch of highly educated millennial urban liberals, many of whom were born and sometimes educated overseas.
Their key policy is a reshaping of the tax system. Apparently we don’t have enough breadth and variety in our sources of tax. We only tax income, company profits, consumption and services and just for good measure we slap excise and levies on a variety of substances and services like fuel, vehicles, alcohol and tobacco.
All that means the government collected $172 billion dollars last fiscal year. The problem was they spent $183 billion, much of it inefficiently.
But Opportunity doesn’t think that’s enough. Too many people have too much property and it’s worth too much. So they intend to sting an annual 1.75 percent on all urban property values and 0.5 percent each year on rural land.
If you own a million dollar property – and let’s face it, they’re as common as muck these days - you’ll be stung $17,500 a year in land tax. Oh, you still have to pay rates and insurance on it. There’s no exemption for the family home.
But if you’re retired and have no income you can defer until you pop off and your estate will be slugged as many years as you haven’t paid. Therefore if you’re 70, have little income apart from superannuation and can’t pay the tax on your million dollar house each year but go on living till you’re 90, your beneficiaries will see $350,000 taken out of the estate.
Great eh?
If your farm is worth $3 million, a not uncommon valuation, the annual tax bill will be $15,000. Let’s hope those high meat and milk prices stay.
But do not fret. In return for having an extravagant tax bill, Opportunity want to give you a Citizens Income of $400 a week. That’s everyone. Millionaires to paupers and everybody in between. What’s more there’ll be no forms to fill in, it won’t be taxed and it’ll mean up to two thousand jobs can be done away with at MSD and those people can then move to more productive jobs!
Seriously, this is what Ms Wong told RNZ’s Guyon Espiner.
Even the Opportunity leader admits that property values could reduce at least 10 percent with this policy. That’s OK because more people will be able to afford to buy them.
A land tax, she says, will raise $28 billion. Of that $24 billion will be paid out in the Citizen’s Income.
Why doesn’t she do another rebrand and just call it the Robin Hood Party? Taking from the (sort of) rich and giving to the poor, or rather those who don’t own property. As Ms Wong stated on RNZ, some high earning individuals who don’t own property will effectively get a tax cut because if you’re making $150,000 a year but don’t own a house, Opportunity will slip you another $400 a week just to make it easier to make the rent.
Dear me.
It gets worse. She wants ALL public transport free (eat that Labour), wants to triple renewable energy resources but won’t specify what kind or who’s paying, and just to make a farmer’s day, wants to add agricultural emissions to the ETS.
Oh, and they want to initiate Citizens Assemblies to discuss issues and make recommendations to parliament. Why bother with elected representatives then?
They have identified 43 candidates so far, all of them standing in electorate seats. The party list shows Qiulae Wong at 1, Daniel Eb is number 2 and Kayla Kingdon-Bebb at 3. They were born in Fiji, South Africa and Canada.
Daniel Eb is a farmer from Kaipara and the Opportunity Deputy Leader. Kayla Kingdon-Bebb is “an environmental policy leader” who is CEO of WWF, the World Wildlife Fund.
Oh, and she was one of the co-authors of He Puapua, the Nania Mahuta requested action plan to achieve the goals of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Say no more.
.Qiulae Wong says Opportunity is starting its policy from evidence rather than ideology.
This seventy-something property owning superannuitant can’t quite rationalise that.
Sadly the Opportunity polling trajectory says they could be part of any Labour led coalition government.
National surely wouldn’t touch them with a long and very slippery barge pole would they?
But if we look on the bright side, Te Pati Maori would be on the cross benches.
Peter Williams was a writer and broadcaster for half a century. Now watching from the sidelines. Peter blogs regularly on Peter’s Substack where this article was sourced.
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