Natalia Albert says what the Opportunity Party is attempting to do is nearly impossible. Yet…

By Natalia Albert*

What it's actually like at the coalface

In 2023 I stood for the Opportunities Party (now the Opportunity Party) in Wellington Central. No funding, no profile, 14 years of formal political science behind me, and none of it bought me a minute of media attention. I worked harder for less coverage than I've ever worked for anything in my life and still walked away with 5.5% of the party vote in my electorate, a result I wear as a badge of honour by the way.

Nationally, TOP got 2.22%. No seats. Three years on, under new leader Qiulae Wong, the Opportunity Party is polling higher than it ever has. What the Opportunity Party is trying to do is the hardest thing in politics. That’s the story, not whether they deserve the media they are getting. Which is an incredibly narrow way of debating this moment. 

The Opportunities Party decade of learning the hard way

This is the Party's fourth go at this, and the current strategy is working better than anybody thought it would. New board, new constitution, more candidates, focus on party vote and effective fundraising strategy. 

When Gareth Morgan launched the party in 2016, he threw an estimated $2 million to $4 million of his own money into it, which is a shit ton of money. They ran a campaign built almost entirely around his own profile and his controversy, the “lipstick on a pig” comment about Jacinda Ardern and of course, the cats.

For that amount of money, the result was appalling, hitting narrowly: 2.4% in 2017, immediate relevance with nothing to show for it. Then Morgan resigned the leadership three months later, pulled his funding entirely within two years, and publicly trashed the people left running the party on his way out.

The Opportunities Party nearly deregistered. It limped into 2020 with 1.5%, its worst result ever. The whole operation had been built around one man's money and shitty political strategy. 

The Conservative Party under Colin Craig lived a similar version of this story on a compressed timeline. Self-funded, high-profile, controversial from day one. In 2014, it hit 3.97% of the party vote, the closest any minor party without an electorate seat has come to the 5% threshold in the MMP era. Then it collapsed. Craig resigned within a year, and the party never cracked 1.5% again.

The Opportunities Party and the Conservative Party are, in effect, two versions of the same story: a minor party built around one wealthy, combative figure can spike fast, but then inevitably crash. 

In 2020: 1.5%, then in 2023: 2.22%, the Raf Manji era, my era, still no seats. Three elections since Morgan walked away, no clear upward trend, until now. The current approach, Wong as leader and Iain Lees-Galloway running operations separately as general manager, no single mega-funder who can close a cheque book and gut the whole thing, is a direct response to exactly what killed the party the first time.

There's a second precedent worth flagging. For most of the 2000s and into the 2010s, ACT survived on the Epsom electorate alone, polling under 1% in the party vote for years at a stretch. It looked like a dead party walking. Then, from 2017 onward under David Seymour, it rebuilt into a multi-election political force, not off one news cycle, but off sustained organisational work across several elections. Outstanding efforts, regardless of what you think of the leader or the party.

Politically ACT is a masterclass for small parties. That's the model the Opportunity Party would need to be following for its current numbers to mean anything lasting.

A word on the media debate: yes, and no

There's a live argument right now, including from commentators like Ani O'Brien, about whether the Opportunity Party is getting more coverage than ever, especially compared with parties like the New Conservatives, who've sat in a similar range for years without anything like the same attention. As Ani mentions. Sure, but also it’s not that simple. 

Sure, because the Opportunity Party's current coverage probably is more favourable in tone than its raw polling alone would predict. No, because the comparison flattens two very different eras into one story, and that flattening is problematic, and exactly the kind of oversimplification I think is the biggest risk in political commentary this year.

In 2017, the Opportunities Party got outsized coverage for the same reason Colin Craig's Conservatives did: a wealthy, combative founder generates news. That's spectacle and money buying attention, not journalists quietly favouring the Opportunities Party politics. It's a cleaner explanation than a simple affinity theory, and it applies equally to a right-leaning party and a left-leaning one.

But Morgan is gone. There's no equivalent figure driving the Opportunity Party coverage now, no cheque book, no scandal-a-week routine. If the Opportunity Party is still getting heavy, favourable coverage in 2026 without that mechanism, the “controversy and money” explanation doesn't work.

I don't think it's the question that decides whether the Opportunity Party succeeds, media attention can and is critical to generate momentum, but it is absolutely not easy to get nor can it be manufactured. It takes a laser sharp stagey, a leader that can deliver said strategy and a series of stars and vibes that need to align. 

The real barrier

New Zealand's political system is built in ways that make it extraordinarily hard for any new party to survive, let alone become influential. The threshold is too high. The funding model favours whoever already has money or profile. The media economics reward spectacle over patience. The Opportunities Party hit all three walls under Morgan. Craig's Conservatives hit the same walls from a different angle. ACT only got through by David Seymour grinding slowly and patiently for the better part of a decade.

For scale: across all seven MMP elections to date, minor parties that made it into Parliament and contested more than one election have averaged; 7.7% for the Greens, 7.6% for NZ First, 3.9% for ACT, 1.8% for the Māori Party. Even the Opportunity Party's best current polling sits around or below that long-run average for parties that succeeded at all. 

That's the real story here, not whether Wong is getting a fair shake from the press gallery. Whether the Opportunity Party breaks through this time or not, the structural barriers that make this nearly impossible for any small party aren't going anywhere. What's changed is that the Opportunities/Opportunity Party has spent the better part of a decade slowly working out how to survive them. Will they make it in? Can this political momentum materialize into votes? These are the debates worth having and understating, not whether Q deserves media attention or not. 

*Natalia Albert is a political scientist living in Wellington exploring how to govern divided societies in diverse, liberal democracies, with a focus on New Zealand politics. She writes weekly on her Substack, Less Certain. Albert stood as a TOP candidate in the 2023 election.