The problem with TOP

It all comes down to imagination (too much imagination)

Photo by Luke van Zyl on Unsplash

The Opportunities Party has now rebranded as “Opportunity”, presumably on theory that it was the definite article that was holding them back.

It’s still the same party, though. It still describes itself as a party committed to evidence-based policy. Opportunity follows the data, where are led to believe, wherever it takes them.

As a sceptic of self-conscious technocracy, I can only say that I am relieved that the party seems to remain allergic to evidence-based politics. There is, after all, no great mystery to political campaigning and an abundance of rigorous literature. TOP seems to avoid it all costs.

Perhaps there is only so much empirical method that a single institution can absorb?

Opportunity has existed across three electoral cycles and five leaders. It has achieved results of 2.4 percent, 1.5 percent, and 2.2 percent. The February Roy Morgan poll had them at four percent, which is the highest the party has polled in its existence and which its supporters will treat as evidence of an imminent breakthrough.

But as Colin Craig could tell you, polling at four percent in an election year is about the same as polling at one percent.

If TOP had any kind of political discipline, it might actually find that its basic proposition (a pragmatic, economically literate party that sits in the centre) is one that a large number of New Zealand voters would find attractive if it were ever competently executed. The gap in the market does exist.

The problem is that Opportunity has spent a decade filling that gap with a product that nobody really wants to buy, while making every mistake that the political evidence says you should avoid.

The pattern is always the same. A leader with an interesting biography arrives and generates a brief flurry of media interest. The party announces a suite of policies that range from smug to completely unrealistic. There is a mismatch between the parties’ claimed values and its presentation that makes it hard for voters to work out what the party is for in the way that voters need to understand to be able to vote for that party.

The result on election night is a disappointment. The leader moves on. The cycle begins again.

Consider the current iteration. The party’s new leader is Qiulae Wong, who goes by “Q.” Visit the party’s website and you are greeted with a wall of vivid cyan and the heading “Meet Q.”

I have no doubt Wong is a capable person. She has a strong professional background and obvious political potential. But reducing the leader of a serious political party to a single-letter brand makes the whole thing feel synthetic. It suggests a party more interested in quirky presentation than sober politics, and New Zealand voters are generally quick to spot that.

People can call themselves whatever they like, and often have perfectly good personal reasons for doing so. The leader of the New Zealand Republican movement goes by the single name of “Savage” and we all remember when Prince changed his stage name to an unpronounceable symbol.

It is also true that, in an English-speaking country, not having an Anglo name can be an unfair handicap. My name is “Hehir” and that difficulty is something I have had to contend with all my life, including as a frequent broadcasting guest. This is a bias that exists in the electorate and it is not Wong’s problem to solve.

What is a strategic choice, and therefore fair game for criticism, is the decision to double down on a single initial. It creates an immediate, if subtle, barrier. Most voters are instinctively conventional. When you go on the campaign trail with a version of your name stripped back to a single letter, you are asking prospective voters to buy into a piece of branding before they have bought into the politician. That is a poor trade for a small party, which cannot afford to lose even a sliver of cautious, middle-of-the-road support in exchange for a handful of voters who like something quirky.

Let’s put it simply: a party that wishes to break conventions needs to be as aggressively conventional as possible in how it presents itself. Voters will tolerate radical ideas far more readily than they will tolerate anything that makes the party itself feel unfamiliar, stylised or hard to grasp.

The party also appears to believe that the involvement of former parliamentarians lends it credibility. I suppose the idea is that the experience as a kind of borrowed authority. Like the presence of people who have been in Parliament before is itself a proof of seriousness.

The evidence suggests the opposite. The history of centrist minor parties that have tried to build themselves around former MPs from major parties is a history of almost unbroken failure. United New Zealand was founded in 1995 by seven sitting MPs (four from National, two from Labour and former Labour MP Peter Dunne, who had already established his own party). It was intended to be exactly what Opportunity now claims to be: a liberal centrist party drawing moderates from both sides.

It had sitting members of Parliament, it had a charismatic leader in Clive Matthewson, and it had the tailwind of a brand new proportional system that was supposed to reward exactly this kind of venture. The result at the 1996 election was a catastrophe. Matthewson, whose old seat had been abolished in the transition to MMP, placed fourth in his new electorate. Every United MP except Dunne lost their seat. The party was functionally dead within a single electoral cycle.

Britain had a go at it with Change UK, which was launched in 2019 by eleven sitting MPs drawn from both the Conservatives and Labour. It had enormous media coverage, genuine public curiosity, and the kind of name recognition that new parties can normally only dream of. It existed for ten months. Every single one of its MPs lost their seat at the general election.

The policy platform reinforces the broader problem. In the space of a few weeks, Opportunity has announced that it wants to introduce a land value tax, replace all welfare payments including superannuation with a means-tested “citizen’s income,” abolish prisons by 2040, ban bottom trawling, invest in renewable energy, and establish citizens’ assemblies for major policy decisions. Its State of the Nation address was attended by representatives of Greenpeace, Forest & Bird, and the World Wildlife Fund, which were all organisations that had boycotted the National Party’s Blue-Greens forum.

If you are trying to position yourself as a centrist party that can work with either side of the aisle, surrounding yourself with environmental activists and former Labour ministers while promising to abolish prisons is a curious way to go about it.

The messaging is not mixed so much as it is incoherent. Who is this party for? Is it for the economically liberal voter who wants tax reform but finds Labour too statist? Is it for the Green voter who wants more radical environmental policy? Is it for the superannuation reformer? The criminal justice radical? The deliberative democracy enthusiast? The answer appears to be “all of the above,” which in practice means it is for nobody in particular.

What makes this worse is that the party is effectively burning off potential voters on policies it has no realistic prospect of ever delivering. A party polling between two and four percent is not in a position to abolish prisons, redesign the welfare state, or impose sweeping new tax regimes.

At best, it might hope to influence the margins of a coalition agreement. Yet instead of focusing on a small number of credible, negotiable priorities, it asks voters to sign up to an entire programme of maximalist reform. The predictable result is that voters who might be open to a sensible, centrist alternative walk away, unwilling to endorse a package that feels both overreaching and unattainable.

If the party actually wants to get to five percent (and I offer this advice in the full expectation that it will be ignored), it really needs to rethink how it does politics. And if it hired me to give it some advice, here is what I would say…

The first thing is to be aggressively, almost painfully conventional. For all the reasons outlined above. No gimmicks. No websites that looks like it was designed for a tech startup’s Series A pitch deck.

Every candidate should present as someone you could plausibly imagine as your family accountant or doctor. The party’s entire visual and rhetorical identity should communicate one thing: these are serious people who want to do serious work. New Zealanders might be interested in a centrist alternative, but voters are generally not looking for a political art project.

The second is to refuse, completely and permanently, to engage in the culture war. This is where the real opportunity lies and it is the opportunity that no other party is exploiting. There are Christians who want a land tax, secular liberals who want benefit reform, and small-town pragmatists who are furious about housing costs but will not vote for a party that is also going to lecture them about anything else.

These people cannot currently vote for the same party because every party in New Zealand insists on bundling its economic platform with a full set of cultural positions that immediately alienates half of the potential coalition.

If I were advising the party I would tell it to say, publicly and repeatedly, that it does not have positions on social and cultural issues. It’s leadership should never be drawn on them. It should never say anything that is not about the economic settings that are making this country poorer.

Come as you are. Leave the rest at the door. No opinions on bottom trawling. No opinions on prisons. Certainly no citizens’ assemblies. Just economics.

When a journalist asks what Opportunity thinks about this week’s cultural controversy, the answer should always be the same: “that is not what we are here for, and here is what we think about the tax system.” Every time. No exceptions. No freelancing by candidates. The policy is silence and the silence is the product for anything close to being a third rail issue.

The third thing would be the most helpful for the highly rational voters that Opportunity seems to want to own. The party should publish, well before the election, a tiered set of policy commitments explicitly linked to the number of seats the party wins. And it should declare in advance that it will work with whichever major party — National or Labour — accepts the most of those commitments, with a tie going to the larger party.

Now, to be fair, this is the opposite of how minor parties in New Zealand usually operate. The usual approach is vagueness about bottom lines, backroom negotiations after the election, and then either selling out your voters for a ministerial warrant or collapsing the government over something nobody voted for. Voters have seen this movie and they are deeply cynical about how it ends.

So there is space here for Opportunity to do something different. It should say:

• The bottom line at six sears is a specific tax reform — the introduction of a risk-free return method for taxing the imputed income on residential property, say, or a particular adjustment to Working for Families abatement rates.

• The bottom line at eight seats is the tax reform plus a specific housing supply measure plus a particular infrastructure funding mechanism.

• The bottom line at ten seats is all of the above plus congestion pricing in Auckland with revenue hypothecated to transport investment as well as planning reform to permit more as-of-right medium-density development in major urban areas.

And then the critical commitment: Opportunity will not support either major party in government unless the full package corresponding to its seat count is accepted. Not most of it. All of it. If National or Labour wants Opportunity’s guaranteed votes on confidence and supply, they accept the relevant tier or they find their majority elsewhere.

As I say, small parties in New Zealand almost never do this. But there is suggestive evidence from overseas that parties which are clear in advance about their coalition terms and priorities make it easier for voters to understand what their vote will actually deliver, and are rewarded with greater credibility as a result. In a proportional system, clarity is not a weakness.

It is one of the few ways a minor party can turn interest into trust.

None of this is intellectually difficult. It does not require brilliance or even originality. It requires something much harder: the discipline to be boring, the discipline to stay quiet when every instinct says to weigh in, and the discipline to commit publicly to specific outcomes knowing you will be held to them.

And it requires the type of humility that, to be fair, is not something that always comes naturally to people who think they can disrupt or remake the political system without learning very much about it.

That discipline is the one thing this party has never shown. And we see that in a platform that stretches from land taxes to prison abolition to deliberative democracy. It is a party that is still, after a decade, more interested in the performance of politics than in its practice.

So the voters are there. And the gap in the market is there. But the gap will remain unfilled for as long as the people trying to fill it think themselves about the type of retail politics that actually works.

This is the tension at the heart of the whole project. The energy behind Opportunity is centrist, but it is radically centrist. The party wants to occupy the centre, but it wants to do so in a way that feels disruptive, unconventional and new. The problem is that the big lump of centrist voters who swing between National and Labour are not looking for disruption.

They are decidedly anti-radical, for the most part. They are entirely conventional. They want sensible management, modest but intelligent reform and a party that wnats to fix government rather than one that looks like it is trying to reinvent the concept.

This is not a contradiction that better branding or a sharper policy platform can resolve. It is a fundamental mismatch between the party’s self-image and its target market. Until Opportunity understands that the voters it needs are not excited by radicalism of any kind (including of the radical centre) it will keep building a product that its natural customers do not want to buy.