New Zealand gives a party two routes into Parliament. It can win 5 percent of the party vote, or it can win a single electorate seat. The Opportunity Party has tried both for a decade without success. Now a 1News Verian poll has it at 4.6 percent, just short of the line.
The party’s history is not tidy. It has had five leaders and has tweaked its name, from “Opportunities” to “Opportunity”. The current leader, Qiulae Wong, took over late in 2025, when the rebrand happened. She is 38, and she knows what is riding on this. RNZ described the election as make-or-break for her party.
Why newcomers struggle
There is a pattern here that works against her. MMP began in 1996, and no truly new party has reached Parliament under it. The ones that look new usually are not. ACT’s founders were ex-Labour and ex-National MPs. NZ First broke away from National. The Greens first got in through the Alliance, itself a Labour offshoot. United Future, the original Māori Party and Mana all trace back to existing parliamentary parties. The Opportunity Party would be the first with no such parentage, and it has failed in each of the past three elections.
A second poll gives a little hope. Roy Morgan had the party over the threshold at 6.5 percent, according to RNZ analysis. Massey University politics professor Richard Shaw noted that Wong is also contesting Mt Albert, a seat Labour’s Helen White holds by a very thin majority. If the party hovers near 5 percent, he suggested, Labour and Green voters might give Wong their electorate vote.
Kingmaker talk
Wong told Morning Report she wants her party to take over from New Zealand First in the kingmaker role. Her pitch is blunt. “I believe they stand for division and they use division to get votes,” she said of NZ First, “whereas we want to actually find common ground and bring people together.” She also said NZ First has “a bit of a nostalgic view of what New Zealand could be” and wants to take the country backwards.
Asked which major party she would back, she did not pick a side. The party would negotiate first with whichever party wins the most votes. If that fails, it would go to the other side. Failing both, it would support a minority government from the cross-benches. Bottom lines would come close to the election, among them a long-term energy strategy, oceans, and productivity and innovation.
The policy at the centre
The platform is not timid. It includes a universal basic income of $20,000 for all, funded by heavier tax on land and lighter tax on incomes. Founder Gareth Morgan set the original figure at $10,000. Wong called it “naive” to expect such a shakeup overnight, and proposed a 10-year transition. Her reasoning is that property is currently untaxed, and shifting the burden there would let people take home more pay.
Shaw cautioned that the party’s strength may matter less than its source. If its support is mostly recycled from Labour and the Greens, it could clear the threshold and still not decide who governs. The election is on 7 November.
Sources
- Opportunity Party leader Qiulae Wong on the party's surprise surge in a new poll (RNZ)
- This 'centrist' party is rising in NZ polls. Will it prove power broker? (RNZ analysis)
