If the Opportunity Party wants to enter Parliament, then it will need policies that make the voters say: 'Wow! That’s a bloody good idea!'

By Chris Trotter*

Are those charged with giving effect to the will of the people committed to their task? It is a critical political question, because if the answer is “No”, then democracy will very quickly be reduced to a sham. When the “Implementing Class” loses faith in its instructions, and democracy is downgraded, then the only thing of which we can be certain is that whatever ends up replacing it will be much, much worse.

The Implementing Class was much on my mind this weekend. What used to be known as “The Opportunities Party” (TOP) chose Sunday, 16 November 2025, to introduce both its new leader, Qiulae ‘Q’ Wong, and its new name.

TOP, now OP, and “Q” (appointed by the party’s governing board rather than elected by its members) has been tasked with hauling the party over the 5 percent MMP threshold. (To be fair, that was also the key task of her elected predecessors, none of whom succeeded.)

Attracting the support of just one-in-twenty New Zealanders is not exactly an inspiring political objective. In a representative parliamentary democracy, the minimum electoral target for any political party should be 50 percent+1. Though crossing that majoritarian threshold in anything other than a genuine two-party system (which New Zealand was between 1936 and 1954) is difficult, aspiring to anything less almost always indicates a preference for technocracy over democracy.

Securing the minimum electoral result consistent with the exercise of radical influence is a very different project from winning a popular mandate for radical change. When the Act Party was founded by Roger Douglas and Derek Quigley in 1994, its clear objective was winning the support of a majority of New Zealanders.

Act’s founders’ objective may have been Quixotic, but it was, nonetheless, admirable. Douglas’s experiences in the Fourth Labour Government left him in no doubt that radical change unmandated electorally will always be at risk of rollback. That the core elements of “Rogernomics” remain in place 40 years after they were introduced confirms Douglas’s insight. Regardless of its many casualties, there has never been an enduring actual or potential coalition of political parties large enough to unravel neoliberalism in New Zealand.

Why, then, has the Opportunity Party not embraced a suite of policies capable of grabbing the attention of a majority of voters (a huge number of whom are searching for a viable alternative to the current line-up of political choices) and making them say: “Wow! That’s a bloody good idea!”

Sadly, that’s unlikely to be the voters’ response to the Opportunity Party’s first big policy announcement. The very mention of taxation causes most people to shudder. So, a tax policy promising a “Citizen’s Income”, a Land Value Tax which includes the family home; and a Flat Tax; is practically guaranteed to produce frowns – not smiles.

The promise of a Citizen’s Income (otherwise known as a Universal Basic Income) invariably provokes voter scepticism. To be any good it would have to match the most generous of welfare benefits, and a universal income package of that size would be impossibly expensive. Indeed, the Flat Tax required to fund it would need to be set somewhere between 40 percent to 50 percent! As if that wasn’t enough, asset-rich but cash-poor Kiwi homeowners – i.e. most of us – would struggle to see a Land Value Tax as anything other than a recipe for penury. The number of voters describing these proposals as “bloody good” ideas is, therefore, unlikely to be large.

With a career devoted to persuading large corporations to do the right thing by people and planet, Q’s adaptation to democratic politics promises to be … challenging. The cultivation of support among elites requires a very different set of skills to those required to secure the votes of ordinary citizens.

Not that the OP leader is unaware of the political challenges to be faced and overcome:

“Particularly now, things feel really divided, and it doesn’t feel like we’re making anywhere near the kind of progress we need to on some of those big challenges. Things around inequity and care for the environment ... around how we are going to pay for superannuation and infrastructure.”

“Inequity and care for the environment” – it’s just a jump to the Left. “How are we going to pay for superannuation and infrastructure” – and then a step to the Right. But the OP draping itself all over the political spectrum is no substitute for policy settings equal to its “big challenges”.

Up there with New Zealand’s biggest problems is a rapidly ageing population and the steadily rising cost of the health services associated with it. Far more than superannuation, it is the prospect of a health service overrun by elderly patients requiring eye wateringly expensive treatment that keeps the Treasury bean-counters up at night. The political party that comes up with a formula for keeping as many elderly Kiwis as possible out of the health system, thereby freeing-up the billions needed to tackle all those other big challenges, would easily cross the 5 percent MMP threshold.

Meeting that challenge could not, however, be achieved by engaging in earnest discussions with corporate elites. Achieving a significant improvement in the health of the elderly would entail a level of social mobilisation not seen since World War II. Campaigns to lower dramatically the population’s consumption of salt, sugar, and fat would need to be unrelenting, backed-up by taxes on the food and beverages contributing most egregiously to hypertension, heart disease and diabetes.

By themselves, however, official exhortations to live more healthily would not be enough. They would need to be backed by meaningful incentives to embrace regular exercise and dietary changes. Setting basic health goals which, if attained and verified by medical practitioners, would see tax concessions, or even cash payments, granted to those who found the courage to take on their unhealthiest habits and defeat them, would very rapidly pay for themselves. Citizens could do very well by doing themselves no end of good.

What’s more, healthier over-65s would make raising the age at which New Zealanders received their first super payment a lot easier.

But, if these were the instructions delivered to the Implementing Classes, would they carry them out? Or would accusations of racism, sexism, cultural insensitivity and fat-shaming rain down upon the heads of those attempting to change fundamentally the habits of the nation?

In a recent posting on the British “UnHerd” website, political commentator Aris Roussinos posed the question:

“Let us imagine that, in assuming power, Reform were to embark upon a great rolling series of referendums on the questions dividing the nation from its rulers: on immigration, on crime and punishment, on the headlong rush to Net Zero. Would the governing class, spread across all its perches in the British state, accept the likely results, or would it seek to frustrate and undermine them? Would the democratically expressed will of the British people be respected, whatever the nation decides, or would it be delegitimised as the populism of the base urges, with the establishment’s role being to protect the British people from their own desires? We already know the answer.”

As do most New Zealanders. If the Opportunity Party is serious about entering Parliament, it will have to give up any idea of negotiating quietly with the elites – this country has more than enough lobbyists already! If Q wants to effect systemic change, then she will have to learn how to campaign in public, alongside the voters, not in private, behind their backs.

*Chris Trotter has been writing and commenting professionally about New Zealand politics for more than 30 years. He writes a weekly column for interest.co.nz. His work may also be found at http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com.