Antipodean politicians will either construct a post-neoliberal future or see their own futures sliding away

By Chris Trotter*

“Slip-sliding away” is one of those Paul Simon songs that refuses to leave your head for hours and hours. That it re-entered my head in the tragic circumstances of the Mt. Maunganui landslide made it even more annoying.

Simon’s lyrics make it clear that the slippage metaphor which he uses to anchor his song is about psychological, not physical, shifts. He reminds us that hopes and good intentions are hard to keep in place, and prone to collapsing at exactly the wrong moment.

In the months ahead we shall discover exactly how many of the responsible public authorities’ good intentions somehow never made it to their destination. Maybe this time the fullest measure of official accountability will be exacted. More likely it will, once again, slip away.

Reading the latest polls from New Zealand and Australia makes it clear that landforms are not the only solid things slipping and sliding away. In both countries voters from the right and the left are falling away from their traditional political loyalties and collapsing into the arms of the populists.

For Winston Peters’ NZ First Party to be polling in double-figures nine months out from a general election is remarkable. Historically, at this point in the election cycle, the party has been enormously relieved just to be clearing the 5% MMP threshold. Surges in support for Peters’ party tend to come late rather than early.

The most impressive aspect of NZ First polling just a smidgen under 12% so far out from polling-day is that it was predicted with almost casual confidence more than four months ago. In September 2025, at NZ First’s annual conference in Palmerston North, the party’s backroom boffins were projecting a record tally of votes – something in the vicinity of 20% – by the end of 2025. Those convinced that the political ground in New Zealand was already moving, were anticipating an election-night figure of 25%.

Talk is cheap. What minor party strategist hasn’t button-holed a political writer and whispered stories of as-yet-undetected shifts of seismic proportions in voter sentiment? Shifts that will astonish the nation and shame the pundits on election-night. It is standard operating procedure for parties engaged in the constant struggle to be taken seriously by the mainstream media’s political editors.

Most of the time such predictions are dismissed as professional lies. Most of the time the much-vaunted seismic-shifts remain stubbornly invisible in subsequent rounds of polling. This time, however, the shift, if not yet seismic, is irrefutable. According to the Taxpayers’ Union-Curia Poll archive, support for NZ First increased by 53% (from 7.8% to 11.9%) between August 2025 and January 2026. If it continues growing at the present rate, then by July 2025 NZ First should be looking at 18.2% of the Party Vote.

That would be a seismic shift.

According to Richard Harman, proprietor of the “Politik” website: “Curia pollster David Farrar has analysed the last year of polling as far as NZ First support goes and found that 57% of their supporters voted NZF in 2023, 20% National, 5% Labour and 5% ACT.” Were the party to increase its level of support in line with its most optimistic boffins’ projections, then most of it would be obtained at National’s expense. NZ First would be elevated from adjunct to equal.

What would have to happen for National’s voters to desert the party in the numbers necessary to propel NZ First to 20%-plus in the polls?

To answer that question one has only to look across the Tasman, where the Australian Right is in the process of imploding. The Liberal-National Coalition has fallen apart – largely on account of the Liberal leader of the Opposition, Sussan Ley, pressuring the Labour prime minister, Anthony Albanese, into responding to the Bondi Massacre by passing legislation inimical to freedom of expression, and further tightening Australia’s already highly restrictive laws regulating gun ownership.

The most dramatic consequence of Ley’s ideological apostasy has been the sudden surge in voter support for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party. From attracting a Primary Vote of just 6.4% in the general election of May 2025, One Nation is currently polling between 20% and 25%. That is higher than the Liberal Party’s 2025 Primary Vote!

Academic Australian commentators are not impressed by this apparent slide into Pauline’s populist arms. Their take on One Nation is that it is made up of white, poorly-educated male voters over the age of 65 who are unable to reconcile themselves to the ideas and practices of the Twenty-First Century.

But the demographic structure of Australia simply does not uphold this analysis. At 8.5%, the number of Australians who are male and over 65 falls well short of One Nation’s current showing in the polls. Clearly, there are a great deal more than “deplorables” who are prepared to vote for Australia’s most populist electoral option.

The political scientists are on much surer ground when it comes to assessing how closely One Nation’s polling support will match its eventual performance in a general election. Australia’s compulsory voting legislation, coupled with its complicated preferential voting system for the House of Representatives, both tend to produce disappointing election results for outlier parties.

This is not, however, the case in New Zealand. Under its system of mixed-member proportional representation (MMP) a party winning 20% of the Party Vote is entitled to 20% of the seats in the House of Representatives. It is possible that this fact on its own may cause many voters to back away from NZ First as polling day draws near. That said, however, any Party Vote for NZ First that has a 2 in front of it can only signify the sudden and dramatic collapse of a great many of the political truths that formerly anchored the nation.

With the potential for such seismic shifts now evident on both sides of the Tasman, New Zealand prime minister Christopher Luxon’s mission is clear. He must convince the electorate that the 40-year-old experiment in neoliberalism has not failed – as the evidence currently accumulating around the world is indicating – but that it is in fact, and at last, succeeding.

An economic recovery based on the official numbers will not suffice. Most New Zealanders long ago recognised that the official statistics do not reflect their lived experience. The voters will need to see a tangible improvement in their own life, and in the lives of their friends and families, before they reward the National Party with a Party Vote that confirms its position as senior coalition partner. If that tangible improvement is not clearly evident, then Luxon and the Nats are in big trouble.

The key question of the 2026 general election, therefore, is whether or not Winston Peters is prepared to tell the voters that his patience with the 40-year neoliberal experiment is at an end. That the contrast between the still intact nation that preceded “Rogernomics”, and the broken nation of today, can no longer be justified or defended. That the “rules of the game” must be changed – dramatically.

This is what a potentially decisive fraction of the New Zealand electorate has been waiting for someone wielding effective political power to say since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09. In 2017, Peters gave Labour the opportunity to make good the damage it had done. It couldn’t (or wouldn’t) accept the challenge.

Assuming Peters (and Hanson for that matter) remains in good health, and that both the Australasian Right and Left continue to reject their respective populists’ radically remedial projects, then the already unstable position of Australia’s and New Zealand’s once dominant political parties will continue to erode.

Those who fail to set course for a post-neoliberal destination, will soon find it impossible to prevent their own political futures from slip-slidin’ away.

*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.