If the election were held today, the three party coalition government would be booted to the opposition benches according to a 1News–Verian poll.
The TVNZ poll, taken between the 20th and 24th of April, showed the National Party down two percentage points from the previous poll at 36%.
Act dropped one point to 7% and New Zealand First fell below the threshold to just 4%. This is the worst poll result for all three governing parties since the election result.
Left leaning political parties gained support in this poll. Labour rose two points to 30%, the Green Party was up by the same amount at 14%, and Te Pāti Māori held firm at 4%.
Together, this would be enough to form a government with 64 seats in Parliament. The National and Act parties would be on the cross-benches with only 57 seats.
Of course, one poll result shouldn’t be taken as gospel. An average of recent public polls still shows the Coalition commanding a comfortable lead.
However, the poll result does demonstrate the new government’s cost-cutting and controversy stirring can rub the public the wrong way.
Polling firm Verian included a list of key events in its report to TVNZ, including Winston Peters’ state of the nation speech which compared co-governance to Nazi Germany.
And that the Government had continued with spending cuts which had resulted in several thousand public sector job losses.
The demotion of two ministers last week happened after the survey had been mostly completed and would not have been captured in this data.
The poll was of 1000 eligible voters, half of whom were contacted by mobile phone and the other half via an online panel. The margin of error was approximately 3%.
Green with envy
While Christopher Luxon remains the most-preferred Prime Minister in the survey, he dropped from an already-low 25% to just 23%.
Chris Hipkins scraped up one point to 16% and new Green Party co-leader, Chloe Swarbrick, rose two points to 6%.
She now ranks ahead of David Seymour and Winston Peters who were on 5% and 4%, respectively.
Other newly-elected governments and leaders have had similarly weak polls shortly after elections but rarely in their first term.
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