Chris Trotter
You hear it before you see it. The boy with the bullhorn is persistent. Stepping out onto your front porch, you catch the car emblazoned with the unmistakeable logo as it cruises by. Seems there’s a street-corner meeting nearby in, crikey, two minutes. You pull on your jacket and head out.
A surprising number of your neighbours are converging on the small cluster of party activists, all carrying printed placards, lined up in front of the woman on the soapbox. She’s calling you in, urging you to come closer, introducing herself with a disarming mixture of public-facing confidence and self-deprecation.
Your neighbours are already laughing at her jokes. The candidate’s political humour is wicked, skewering her rivals and their parties with the practised ease of a stand-up comic who’s road-tested her best lines a hundred times over.
At least 20 people are gathered around the candidate by now, a tight circle of interest generating the unmistakable force-field of democracy in action. It’s not something that can be captured on screen. AI can’t give you the answers it supplies. If you could bottle it, why you’d be … um … President of the United States of America.
The ACT Party has never been slow when it comes to picking up the latest innovations from the USA. Its AGM-cum-election rally on Sunday 28 June was a case in point. In the spirit of the street-corner meeting, the organisers had placed the speakers in the middle of Shed 10 where, wired for sound and without the benefit of (obvious) autocues, they could deliver their messages through a full 360° to the enveloping throng.
The whole set-up is designed to encourage and deliver high-energy performances. Multiple cameras allow for sharp changes of angle and perspective. The sound system is capable of pumping out heart-pumping music as well as tub-thumping political messages. Those watching it online are guaranteed a good show. Not as good as being there – but close.
Small-target strategy
The contrast between ACT’s staging and Labour’s, on the same day, was sharp – and telling.
In election years, the Labour Party does not hold a conference, it stages a “congress”. Not for Chris Hipkins the fizzy simulacrum of direct democracy which ACT’s stage directors laid on, but the tried and true formula of the leader at the podium, raised up high above a sea of delirious followers.
Fair enough, it worked for Albert Speer at Nuremberg, although Wellington’s ridiculously expensive Tākina Convention Centre wasn’t quite up to delivering Speer’s infamous “cathedral of light” – more a dim red glow.
“Dim” appears to be Labour’s watchword for 2026. (It certainly isn’t “Red”!) A manifesto so foggily indistinct that its only visible element is a string of tiny, “fiscally responsible” policy footlights marking the limits of Labour’s political courage.
Some of the journalists present – Wellington-based, it must be presumed, since sending staff from more remote newsrooms when all the congress’s deliberative sessions were barred to the news media would surely constitute extravagance – claimed to have encountered a strong undercurrent of dissatisfaction with Hipkins’ small-target strategy.
They should have been observing a king tide of dissatisfaction.
Over the past two months, Australian-based pollsters Roy Morgan have recorded a statistically significant decline in Labour’s support.
Roy Morgan’s latest poll, released on 30 June, gives the National-led coalition a clear lead with 51% of the vote (61 seats), compared with 42% for the Opposition (51 seats). Support for National is up 0.5% to 31% while Labour has dropped 1% to 25.5%.
It would be unwise for Labour to dismiss this slide as a rogue hallucination. Roy Morgan has a history of detecting political shifts a little in advance of its New Zealand-based competitors. As if to confirm this Aussie boast, the latest 1News Verian Poll, released in June similarly showed Labour shedding five percentage points.
Dramatic restructure
The prime beneficiary of this defection from Labour has been the Opportunity Party, which rose to 4.6% in the 1News Verian poll and increased its share of the party vote to 6% in Roy Morgan’s.
There is nothing small about the targets Opportunity is presenting to the electorate. The economic and social changes which the “consultants’ party” (as Winston Peters cruelly dubbed it) is placing before the electorate would, if introduced, generate precisely the sort of transformation Labour’s activists are seeking, but which the excessively cautious “captain” currently lashed to his party’s mast steadfastly refuses to call.
Given the chance, Opportunity would dramatically restructure New Zealand’s revenue gathering and welfare systems. Replacing the current tangle of welfare entitlements with a universal “citizens’ income” of $370 per week, funded by a Land Value Tax, the party would clear the policy decks with a commitment to radical reform unseen since 1984.
The Opportunity programme has been characterised by many on the Right as “left-wing”, but those who write the party off as a Trojan horse for Labour and the Greens are mistaken.
The idea of a minimum basic income hails from the neoliberal Right, not the “communist” Left. No less a free market paragon than the Chicago school’s Milton Friedman was promoting the idea as far back as the 1970s.
The Land Tax is also an American idea. Its most vehement promoter was the 19th century reformer Henry George. His 1879 book Progress & Poverty which advocated a single tax on the unimproved value of land powerfully influenced the policies of New Zealand’s Liberal government (1891-1912).
The principal revenue gatherer of New Zealand local government, the council rates paid by all businesses and households, is an enduring relic of George’s economic and political influence.
It would seem that Opportunity has a stronger grasp of New Zealand’s history than the overwhelming majority of its political class. The party owes more to Richard John Seddon’s government than it does to Karl Marx’s theories.
But history does not win general elections so Opportunity will need more than that. What just might propel it over the 5% MMP threshold, however, is its own evocation of the street-corner democracy that ACT’s stage managers so successfully reproduced at its AGM/rally.
ACT may want to shrink the state to the point where it can be dragged down the hall and drowned in the bathtub, but that ambition is not one a party can build a successful election campaign around.
Preaching classical liberal philosophy to the electorate has never worked for ACT. Indeed, nothing has driven it towards political oblivion at a faster clip. What does work for ACT, however, is its deeply ingrained habit of engaging directly and forthrightly with the public.
The party’s founder, Sir Roger Douglas, took his ideas into the factories (it helped that he knew the owners) and did his best to sell them to the workers. There were very few takers.
The man who rescued the party from its 1% irrelevance was Richard Prebble. He understood that the party’s classical liberal programme had to be smuggled in under the cover of unabashed right-wing demagoguery. Anti-treaty. Law and order. Beneficiary bashing. Catering to the cockies. To hell with the environment. These were the issues that pulled in the conservative punters.
They still do.
Integrity issues
But they’re not Opportunity’s issues. Qiulae Wong and her 43 candidates will need something altogether different to gather crowds on the nation’s street corners. Something serious enough to make jokes about. Something wicked enough to make the voters’ brows furrow. Something that singles out Opportunity’s candidates from all the others.
Dr Bryce Edwards, Director of the Democracy Project, reckons they could do it by taking aim at the vested interests and lobbyists who manoeuvre all those rich and powerful thumbs onto the scales of public policy:
“It is on integrity issues that Opportunity could separate itself from both Labour and National. Neither major party has shown much appetite for serious lobbying reform. Neither has wanted to properly clean up political donations. Neither has been brave on conflicts of interest, ministerial access, revolving doors, or the grey zone between public policy and private influence. Opportunity should make more of this. A party promising to change politics should not just talk about future generations and clean energy. It should talk about power – who has it, who buys access to it, and who gets shut out.”
A candidate standing on a street-corner and delivering a speech about how the system is rigged against ordinary decent citizens like the people gathered around her. About how the fat cats go about getting what they want. About how much it costs. About what it takes to get the elites’ policies rushed through Parliament under urgency.
A candidate like that will soon find herself generating the sort of democratic force-field that produces excitement, engagement and commitment.
A candidate like that will carry her party over the MMP threshold and into the House of Representatives.
That’s when the fun will really start.
Chris Trotter
Chris Trotter has more than 30 years’ experience as a political commentator. He is the author of the Bowalley Road blog.
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