New Zealand First’s leader has been saying all year his party would prove the opinion polls wrong.
Even as the party surged to an unlikely 15 percent in one poll and almost 14 in others, Winston Peters maintained his dismissive attitude, citing his party’s crowd-pulling campaigning would deliver even greater success, and predicting a push to victory in November.
As it turns out, NZ First is starting to prove those polls wrong, but not on the upside as predicted by Peters. In poll after poll, the party has plateaued from a period of strong growth, or slowly ebbed away from its record highs. Its bid to out-perform its record 1996 result of 13 percent and 17 seats in Parliament is no longer as obvious as in the second quarter of this year.
The latest 1News-Verian poll has the party down 3 points to 8 percent.
Gallingly, its coalition partner and rival Act is lifting after an unusual period of drift, now at 9 percent, and a newcomer Opportunity is equal with NZ First on 8 percent.
In the Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll, NZ First has fallen incrementally for four months in a row, from 13.6 to 9.1 percent between April and August.
The Talbot Mills poll, by the Labour Party pollster but for corporate clients, had NZ First off from 15 percent to 12 percent between April and July.
Only the RNZ-Reid Research poll has NZ First heading up as at July, to its highest level of 11.5 percent, from 10.5 percent in April. That poll was in the field well before Peters’ comments against a Chinese-born Green MP on July 29.
In three polls in July it was in third place overall. In the 1News poll this week it is fifth.
More polls are coming, thick and fast, as election season warms up, but even if NZ First should rise again there could be a lesson in its fortunes and fall over the past months.
Peters will no longer work with Labour, so no longer leads a classical centre party, but of course by default can remain a kingmaker if NZ First gets enough seats to help National and Act remain in government.
Opportunity is the new swinging kingmaker. It could put either side into power, on those 1News Verian poll numbers. Luxon in July ruled out working with Opportunity, but that won’t necessarily hold if the party is needed, perhaps in a confidence and supply, cross-benches deal.
Act’s rise could be partly off the back of high-profile broadcaster Paul Henry joining its slate. But it could equally be as a result of it adopting a more high-minded, collegial approach to its coalition arrangement, not buying into the undermining of National and refraining from personal corrosiveness.
NZ First is doing what it does when in government and facing an election. As in 2008 and 2020, when Peters and his party first raised controversy over its donations during Helen Clark’s administration, then openly feuded with Jacinda Ardern’s, NZ First is out for itself. In both those years the solo belligerence failed to lift its polling. Both times it exited Parliament altogether.
This time, with a healthy buffer a few months out, it would be surprising if the same thing happened. But the overflowing list of new recruits, retreaded politicians and an All Black, might now have to be jammed into an altogether shorter list of likely MPs.
The perceived wisdom is that NZ First surges in the polls in election years, but it is factually not always so.
For a time this year, Peters’ experience might have seemed a strong contrast with the first-timer in government, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, and acted as a boost for NZ First. The adult in the room, perhaps.
But Peters’ highly public differences with Luxon over the India free trade deal and at least one other foreign affairs issue, and his and deputy Shane Jones’ racist comments about ethnic minorities, have not seemingly worked to their favour in the polls.
The usually traditional Peters has resorted to foul and socially incorrect language – labelling a journalist’s query a “wanker question” and a Greens’ policy “appallingly retarded”. Jones refused to hear in Parliament from an MP he called the “arse-end of a vacuum cleaner”. Discredited former candidate and ex Labour MP Stuart Nash’s demeaning commentary on a female National MP’s maternity leave and work ethic added to the bro-talk emanating from the party.
Could it be that the swearing, crassness and slurs are not resonating?
Act’s Paul Henry also toyed with turning the air blue, calling some school children “little shits”. No more might be expected of him, however, in shock jock mode.
New Zealand First’s flattening trajectory coincides as well with a series of policy promises, launched at full-house community meetings dominated by its grey-haired base. Buying back the BNZ bank, restricting permanent residents from voting, a $100b future fund, $1b to survey potential deep sea gas reserves, a $5000 annual grant per child for up to three kids for their first three years to boost birth rates.
Those policies might be holding up the party’s polling, but there have been few discernible gains from such big ticket promises.
It could well be that this week’s disunity in the National Party produces a rebound of sorts in NZ First’s own numbers in a kind-of rush to the devil-you-know.
Peters himself has seen his standing in the 1News-Verian preferred Prime Minister question drop as well, by 3 points to 7 percent between June and August. He told the Chinese-born New Zealander, Green MP Lawrence Xu-Nan, in Parliament in late July to go back to his own country, where they ‘lie like flat fish’ – a comment labelled racist by Luxon. The poll was in the field from August 8 to 11.
In the Talbot-Mills poll, Peters hit 15 percent in the preferred PM category in April but has drifted to 12 percent in July.
In the Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll, his preferred figure is off from 12.8 percent in June to 10.5 in August.
In isolation, any of these results could be viewed within the margin of error, or minor blips for a party still polling better than it has for many election year cycles.
But the trend for both NZ First and for Peters personally, across multiple but not all poll releases, seems to show the potential surge of a nationalist, one-law-for-all silent majority might have come and gone for now.
Newsroom’s Campaign Observer column looks at how the competing political parties approach the final months before the November 7 election – their tactics, polling, policies, communications, interaction with each other, and how they compare with elections past.
