Room at the Top

The Opportunities Party could well be a force to be reckoned with as a centrist voice - it's just lacking a leader, a campaign and a lot of money.

- DANYL MCLAUCHLAN

The Opportunities Party (Top) is surging in the polls! Relatively speaking. Founded in late 2016 by the economist Gareth Morgan, Top failed to reach MMP's 5% threshold in 2017, winning just 2.4% of the party vote. It failed again in 2020 (1.5%) under the leadership of Geoff Simmons, Morgan's former chief of staff, and again last year (2.2%) led by former Christchurch city councillor Raf Manji.

But in the publicly available polls released since the last election, an average of 2.81% of voters would give their party vote to Top. Which is impressive for a party that has no seats in Parliament, no presence in the media, no leader, no deputy leader and no money.

They're working on all of these things. When Morgan launched the party seven years ago, it was presented as a "radical centrist" movement. All of its policies would be evidence based and it could enter into coalition with either National or Labour. Once in Parliament, Top would use this leverage to radically transform New Zealand's economy.

For years, political pundits had speculated about the viability of a centrist environmental party, and climate and decarbonisation were central to Morgan's policy platform. Top's key policies were a universal basic income for families with young children and a massive tax switch, lowering income taxes while imposing an unrealised capital-gains tax on all assets, including houses both ideas beloved of policy nerds and technocrats.

The long-prophesied messiah of progressive centrism had entered New Zealand politics.

Unfortunately for Top, Morgan wasn't interested in winning the votes of policy nerds and environment-focused progressive centrists. He saw himself as a populist in Donald Trump's mould, trying to attract working-class voters, and he went about this by launching attacks on Labour's new leader, Jacinda Ardern.