Should you vote for the Opportunity Party?
Arohanui Emily
Feel free to skip to the comments if you read this already in your email!
The opportunity for Opportunity
It's an interesting time in New Zealand politics. For the first time in a while, it looks like there's the chance that another political party might enter Parliament, and political media is accordingly doing its nut. The Opportunity Party, newly rebranded to "Opportunity," has had a couple of pretty good polls now, and suddenly the news is full of Opportunity explainers. I am not here to write another one of those; you can find all of them in their wildly varying quality at the news website of your choice.
I am here to write one for leftists.
While this newsletter's readers include a truly surprising number of right-wingers and even right-wing MPs - some of whom unsubscribe in a fit of pique when Emily or I press the wrong (right?) button - we're not kidding ourselves; this is a leftist newsletter for mostly leftist readers. And a lot of those lefties are looking at the sudden apparent viability of Opportunity in the polls and are wondering what to think or do about it. Online, I'm seeing a lot of opinions, and sometimes even facts, that purport to tell the whole story about the party despite being mutually contradictory.
To deal with this, I'm going to use a quite left-wing concept that doesn't get trotted out a lot these days: the Hegelian dialectic.
If you're an old-fashioned leftist, you may know this term, or the related "dialectical materialism." If you're a newer leftist, you may have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about. I'm about to disappoint both: the old leftists because I am extremely not a Marxist-Leninist and I think dialectical materialism is pseudoscientific bunk, and the rest of you because you are about to find out what dialectical materialism is.
This Wikipedia page does a decent job of explaining the concept, but here's a shorter version: the Hegalian dialectic began as a reasonably interesting line of philosophical enquiry by Marx and Hegel and ended, via a series of galaxy-brained expansions from the likes of Lenin and Stalin, as "dialectical materialism;" genocide-enabling gobbledegook that functioned as a kind of state religion for the Soviet Union. In this form it is absurd, but closer to its original incarnation, it can be an interesting way of resolving tensions between what seem like mutually exclusive truths.
Extremely paraphrased, the Hegelian dialectic is that ideas take the form of a thesis; and an opposed idea, the antithesis. And if you're trying to be a smartypants, you can reconcile these ideas with a synthesis.
And that's what I'm going to attempt with The Opportunity Party.
Thesis: Opportunity is a leftist party.
Antithesis: Opportunity is ACT in disguise.
Synthesis: Yes. But also definitely no.
As a leftist forced to coexist with other leftists, I have seen my share of absurd opinions, but "Opportunity are ACT in disguise!" is about as nonsensical as Kiwi political opinions get, on a par with "National will balance the books!" and "Winston will keep them honest!" As a semi-professional ACT party despiser; please take it from me: Opportunity are nothing like ACT. In fact, ACT, National, and NZ First are quietly (and occasionally loudly) freaking out about Opportunity. They charge them with being the worst thing you can be, leftist, and wanting to "put everyone on a benefit". This last part is true, but not in the pejorative sense; giving everyone no-strings-attached money is what a universal basic income is. A UBI is core Opportunity policy, and it has the advantage of having worked really well practically everywhere it's been tried (lots of times, in lots of places.) While a universal benefit sounds like the least ACT-ish thing possible, the idea has its origins in (arguably) neoliberal thought. But giving everyone the means to survive in dignity - to each according to their needs - is also a fundamentally leftist idea. So it's both! A synthesis!
Thesis: Opportunity are for ordinary Kiwis who are sick of the status quo
Antithesis: TOP was created by a rich guy and is backed by rich guys who are sick of the status quo but for sinister reasons
Synthesis: Sure. The original incarnation of Opportunity, TOP, was the brainchild of notably rich guy Gareth Morgan. He wrote some pretty good books about UBI and climate change (I know this because I actually read them) and then sought to advance those ideas by founding and funding a political party and hiring Sean Plunket as his comms guy. This was as charming and effective as a Molotov cocktail filled with sewage. TOP spent some years in the political wilderness before reappearing as Opportunity under new leader Qiulae "Q" Wong. Since then, I've seen some wild stuff on socials suggesting that Opportunity is still anything to do with Gareth Morgan, or a shady op by New Zealand's ultra-rich. This is wrong, as evidenced by the endless screaming emitting from the actual parties of the ultra-rich: ACT and NZ First. Yes, Opportunity have some rich backers. This is not the conspiracy people are making it out to be; not only do most parties attract some share of wealthy donor money - it's good business to keep politicians who might get elected onside - but some rich people actually have some pretty leftist sympathies. I've spent my career around people of means who vote left, and a lot of them have - very understandably - looked at Labour getting automatically propped up by the Greens, the Greens getting very little of the policy they actually want in government after government, and said to themselves "We need an alternative, one that actually wields some power in negotiations." I don't think that's unfair. I think it's sensible.
Thesis: Opportunity are about greater democratic accountability!
Antithesis: Opportunity are anti-democratic because their leader got their job from a job ad! How very dare they?
Synthesis: Yes. A job ad is not a particularly democratic way to elect a leader. However it doesn't markedly differ from the undemocratic way other parties elect leaders, with the exception of the Greens, who have a genuinely democratic process that's very easy to understand if you have a conjoint graduate degree in political science and statistics. Let us briefly look at the other parties. National elects their leader based on who their caucus wants to be Business Daddy. Labour elects their leader based on whoever's most successfully been a complete greaser in private while maintaining a total lack of personality in public. ACT elects their leader by assembling them out of spare parts ripped out of think tanks. NZ First elects their leader based on which party member is Winston Peters. I think we can conclude, based on the quality of most political leaders in the country, that maybe a job ad isn't a terrible way to try things?
What's more, one of Opportunity's core policy planks is citizen's assemblies, which are a bit like if government was done by a jury. CA's can do remarkable things when allowed to: the reason Ireland passed abortion law reform is partly because of work by a citizen's assembly. Because they're comprised of completely ordinary people picked to be representative of the wider population, you can argue that CAs are a much more democratic form of government than representative democracy. Plus, I would argue that in many countries, including our own, representative democracy has begun to approach the limits of its usefulness. In New Zealand, MMP is simultaneously a huge improvement on undemocratic First Past The Post and a giant disaster that has managed to deliver Winston Peters, the country's most career politician, as De Facto Prime Minister for about eight governments running. Our current form of government is corrupt, ineffective, widely ignores citizen input, and is despised or ignored in turn by more than half of the population. It is also proving incredibly vulnerable to the neofascist forms that neoliberalism is evolving into. We need a new approach to preserve everything that's good about representative democracy while shedding the bits that demonstrably don't work, which is why I'm all for Citizen's Assemblies.
Thesis: Opportunity can finally give bargaining power in government formation to someone other than Winston Peters! Finally, we can have nice things!
Antithesis: Opportunity is going to have its ass handed to it by career politicians in negotiations and their supposed core policies are just guidelines anyway!
Synthesis: Why not both? Recently, Opportunity leader Q said that their polities should be thought of as guidelines, drawing widespread scorn from politics-knowers. I have news for our savvy social media opinionists: All policy is guidelines until you're in government. Saying that a party's core beliefs are flexible or "just guidelines" is standard don't-spook-the-horses electioneering. You can debate the wisdom of that tactic, but it has next to no bearing on what can happen when a government is being negotiated. Opportunity can simply go "oh those things that we said were just guidelines? Well now we hold the balance of power they're actually hardlines. Deal with it," and that will be that. How do we know this? We only have decades of NZ First doing it to prove the point.
Thank you for those Hegelian dialectics! You've convinced me, a diehard leftist Green/TPM/Labour (somehow) voter! I will vote for Opportunity!
Oh no. No. That's not what I'm trying to do at all. Please don't.
I'll get the boilerplate out of the way first: you should vote for whoever you find credible and whose policies you think best represent you. If that's Opportunity, sure. But if you're a leftist who has previously voted somewhere on the Greens/TPM/Labour (somehow) nexus, and you care about the electoral tactics that are necessary to win under MMP, let me convince you why you should continue to vote that way.
Let's say a bunch of Greens voters got sick of all the Woke (somehow missing the fact that the party has always been Woke) and decided to vote for Opportunity instead (who are also Woke, at least by the standards of anyone who uses the word "Woke" unironically in the year 2026.) Let's say that they took about half of the Green vote, which has historically hovered around the 10 percent mark, leaving both parties hovering on the 5 percent threshold. Disaster! You'd have two weak parties instead of one strong-ish one, and - crucially - Opportunity would not hold the balance of power or anything like it. The same thing happens if Opportunity take a substantial proportion of Labour's vote. The maths simply doesn't add up. If Opportunity serve only to cut the Left's lunch it won't work for them, or anyone else.
If you want a left-wing Government, don't vote for Opportunity. Get your National-voting and possibly even NZ First-voting family members and friends to vote for Opportunity.
There are a huge number of National voters, and non-voters, who look at the current political situation with nothing short of dismay. They despair at the takeover of government by a triumvirate comprised of the cursed husk of a malevolent mummy, a malfunctioning android, and a collection of LinkedIn posts given pale pink flesh. They despise the corruption, the venality, that weird tiny weasel person who is suddenly everywhere at knee height. They groan every time Christopher Luxon's perfectly shiny head pops up on television and starts making another ineffable collection of word-shaped sounds. And yet they're still politically opposed to Labour/Greens/TPM thanks to mixture of genuine doubts and deeply-held tribal reasons that they'd struggle to truly articulate. They don't really have a political home right now, and they need one.
And that is the opportunity for Opportunity. If they can position themselves as outside the left-right status quo, something that's not the hated milquetoast "centrist" compromise everyone's so goddamn sick of, they have a good chance of peeling off that crucial 5+ percent from the normally non-voting public and National's rump. And if they pulled that off, leftists, you'd finally have a party with some genuinely good policy negotiating from a position of power with the real handbrake to proper left-shaped reform: Labour.
So that's my pitch. If you're left, vote left. But if you've got a dad or an uncle or a nana or an occasional-beers friend who's a decent person despite always disappointing you with their vote, point them towards a new Opportunity. Because that might be how we finally break the Winston-shaped stranglehold on MMP politics, and get real traction on climate change, housing, poverty, and all the other stuff that so desperately needs to have the needful done to it.
Me again! Emily! I hope you liked this piece by Josh. It was really helpful to me because I was really ready to believe a lot of stuff about TOP because I don't like them. I mean, I still don't like them. But I do think if you are going to vote National, ACT, or NZ First you should change your vote to Opportunity.
And do encourage your mean grandmother or your drunk uncle to change their vote. We need every single vote we can get to ensure we rid ourselves of this cruel coalition.
Love, Emily
PS please take an actual couple of minutes to submit on the remaining stink bills that the Coalition is trying to ram through! You can submit here:
