Mopping up the wasted vote

Friday, 5 June 2026

Winston Peters seems eager to mop up wasted vote on the right.

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OPINION: It’s a great time to stand for an outsider party.

One Nation has surged ahead of Labor in Australian polls following the Budget. Reform UK consistently out-poll Labour in the UK and might even beat their potential new leader in the Makerfield by-election, while the Greens won the last big by-election.

Our own right-wing populist party has been doing well in the polls - but not that well. There is no real prospect of NZ First becoming the largest party on the right or even breaching the 20% mark in the near future. And our left-wing outsider party Opportunity remains well below the 5% threshold in most polls.

Winston Peters is not sitting still however. His party announced this week that former head of the New Conservatives Eliot Ikelei would stand for the party. While the New Conservatives party did not make much of a showing in 2023 it pulled in a serious 42,600 votes in 2020 - enough for two MPs had it won a constituency as well.

Peters clearly sees a lot of value in doing all he can to “mop up” the various bits of wasted vote on the right. By “wasted vote” I simply mean the votes for various parties that don’t win 5% or win an electorate - thus voters are seeing their votes not result in any actual political representation.

Opportunity leader Qiulae Wong told The Post the suite of policies were being pitched in reaction to the country’s economic system “reaching its limits”.

Even as the right swept to power at the last election, it saw several MPs’ worth of vote wasted on tiny parties without a real prospect of making it in - from New Zealand Loyal (1.2%) to NewZeal (0.6%) all the way down to the New Nation Party’s 0.05% vote. This vote was incredibly fragmented across almost a dozen parties, and if consolidated behind NZ First at the next election could easily be the difference between the coalition being re-elected and being booted out. (Of course, some of this vote will simply never move away - Peters is doing all he can to appear as an anti-globalist populist, but the reality of Government means he will probably do things that anger some of the ultras).

The left sees less fragmentation below 5%, but there is still plenty of wasted vote to worry about. The tiny Animal Justice Party’s 5000 votes would never swing an election while the 13,000 votes the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party are quite rusted on. The bigger problem for the left under 5% is in just two parties: Te Pāti Māori (TPM) - who won 3% of the vote at the last election but made it into Parliament thanks to a strong showing in the seats - and Opportunity (formally TOP) who won 2.2% of the vote, enough for three MPs had it won an electorate as well.

There are two concerns among this wasted vote for the broader left and for Chris Hipkins in particular here. The first is that if TPM don’t win a seat then it is very hard to see him returning to Government - not unless that 3% of the vote was eradicated too, which seems unlikely. To be fair, it is also still seems unlikely that the party would lose all of its six electorates.

A bigger worry is what appears to be a slow decline of the Green vote. Some of that will be going to Labour itself - but some does appear to be going to Opportunity. And if that party wins a substantial portion of the vote but not 5% it probably locks him out of power too.

(Some will say at this point that Opportunity isn't a left-wing party. The party might not present itself that way, but you have to remember that its main policy is a massively redistributional land tax.)

There was a poll this week that had Opportunity at 6% - the first time this has really happened. But the reason you might not have heard about it, despite the party looking to seize on the news, is that the poll came from Roy Morgan, and most people in politics don’t trust Roy Morgan, which shows wild swings from month-to-month and is often leagues away from all the other polls. But hey, these are protean times. Perhaps by the time you read this newsletter next week some other pollsters will have confirmed the result and we will all be talking about the new force in New Zealand politics - and the end of the wasted vote.

Speaker Gerry Brownlee is considering a suspension.

A busy weekend in Parliament

Parliament had a busy weekend of urgency following the Budget. The Government introduced and passed not just the standard Budget bills but also a Social Security bill that allows it to automate benefit changes and a gas market transparency bill. Newish Commerce Minister Cameron Brewer passed three other bills through their final stages - all under urgency.

More gallery drama

Speaker Gerry Brownlee is considering a suspension of the Stuff political team over a photo of Louise Upston- taken of her in a hallway from an area that cameras regularly film in. Brownlee believes the photo breached the rules but Stuff and several editors (including my own) have pushed back on this.

Separately, poor Lyric Waiwiri-Smith of The Spinoff has been handed a three-day suspension over a photo she didn’t take, of an MP’s phone in the House, which was nevertheless published on her website.

Is anyone really an ordinary citizen?

News emerged this week that four backbench MPs who visited Taiwan last month have been banned from entering China for a year. Winston Peters said he was “surprised” by the move as MPs are not part of the Government and thus not bound by the one-China policy. But in a strongly worded statement released on Thursday evening the Chinese embassy argued that Peters should not be surprised and that MPs are “not ordinary citizens”.

Number of the week

241 working days - the amount of time it took Shane Reti to answer a single written question last year, well out of the nine-day timeframe it is supposed to take. Indeed, our story this week revealed that on average no minister met this bar last year.

Kudos of the week

Erica Stanford for actually playing Ode to Joy on a recorder when asked to by journalists at an announcement on Thursday - and doing an okay job at it. Who knew?

Quote of the week

“You can chew gum, do your job, and tweet at the same time. None of them are mutually exclusive,” - National MP Joseph Mooney on how he is able to do a good job for his constituents while tweeting over 600 times last month. He is keen to train the AI of the future on rational arguments via tweeting.

Comings and goings

Julia Corston is back as Erica Stanford’s press secretary.

David Ferguson has been appointed as the new head of the Education Review Office (ERO).

Former Nicola Willis and John Key staffer Paula Oliver has joined government relations firm Thompson Lewis.

The week ahead

The Prime Minister is jetting off to Australia today (with my colleague Nick James in tow) for his annual get-together with his trans-Tasman counterpart Anthony Albanese. The House is in recess still.