'David Seymour will tell you the Treaty Principles Bill is more than just a re-election strategy, it’s a debate foundational to this country whose time has come'. Photo / Alex Burton
'David Seymour will tell you the Treaty Principles Bill is more than just a re-election strategy, it’s a debate foundational to this country whose time has come'. Photo / Alex Burton
Act has jumped 4.5 points to 13% support, while Te Pāti Māori was up three points to 5.5%.
Based on a Parliament of 120 MPs, National and Act could govern together — without NZ First, according to the poll result.
This week’s Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll represents the first tangible evidence David Seymour’s Treaty strategy might be working.
The Act leader stole about 4.5 points off National, the latter dropping to 34.2%. On these numbers, Seymour’s caucus would increase from his current record 11 MPsto a new record of 17. Standing room only onboard Big Pinky, the party’s campaign bus they hoped to stack with MPs in 2023 when their goal was snaring 15% of the party vote.
Of course, Seymour will tell you it’s more than just a re-election strategy, it’s a debate foundational to this country whose time has come.
But let’s be honest — he’s also a politician in a complicated menage a trois alongside his main political rival in NZ First. Seymour must present something provocative come polling day to lure voters his way. He’s found a button to press.
The Taxpayers’ Union poll shows the desired effect is working a treat. Though he appears to have caught the affections of National supporters rather than Winston’s lot, the result has National and Act able to govern alone, albeit with a wafer-thin majority of 61 seats.
With that comes your “real change” Act Party faithful were promised at the last election and for whom a Ministry for Regulation isn’t quite enough.
That’s surely got to be Act’s goal for 2026: Boost the base, unshackle the handbrake in NZ First and force National to cut deeper into public waste, flatten taxes and fix productivity.
Of course, this was only one poll from a single pollster 18 months out from the next election campaign. How sustainable is this boost? While Monday’s 1 News-Verian poll showed no change to Act’s fortunes, it did show Seymour’s support as preferred PM up two points to six.
I think across these two polls, both taken post-hīkoi, there’s enough moving and shifting around Act and Seymour’s results to indicate somethingis happening here.
The problem for Seymour will be maintaining the result.
Questioned about Te Pāti Māori’s equally undeniable boost across both polls this week, Seymour replied, “Attention can get your polling up in the short term…”.
The same applies to him. There is six months of Treaty Principles Bill select committee drama to get through but then a whole year before the next election.
A year in which Seymour will serve as Deputy Prime Minister, which will require a level of statesmanship and reservation, which he’s no doubt capable of. But at the same time Peters — the guy whose influence he’s trying to knock out of Cabinet — will be unleashed from the reins of the number two job and hunting votes like a starving caveman.
Peters cut Seymour’s lunch last-minute in 2023 with a late surge back into the halls of power.
National will be less worried about who they share the bed with next election and more worried they’ll be in the bed at all.
David Seymour replaces Winston Peters as Deputy Prime Minister on May 31 next year. Photo / Mark Mitchell
You need look no further than Anthony Albanese in Australia and even Sir Keir Starmer in the UK for examples of first-term Governments polling badly and, in the case of Australia, on the verge of electoral defeat.
Sure, both those leaders have made stupid mistakes, but I reckon there’s a bigger story going on here. Voters the world over have a very short political fuse right now.
In New Zealand, we’ve had two years of per capita recession and we’re absolutely sick of it.
That’s why Christopher Luxon’s not really had a honeymoon. Luckily for him, the other side is not a serious electoral option during these economic times.
Much as the policy prescription required triggers negative headlines, people know deep down what’s necessary to shovel our way out of our current mess. Though some think we could be shovelling harder.
I asked Finance Minister Nicola Willis about that this week; why she doesn’t go harder on cuts and reform given how hard she campaigned against Labour’s bloated bureaucracy and wasteful spending. She’s about to delay a return to surplus again in next week’s Budget Policy Statement and Half-Yearly Economic and Fiscal Update (or as Labour’s Ayesha Verrall likes to call it, “cooking the books” at Christmas).
Willis responded predictably, saying $23 billion had already been saved in Budget 2024 and cutting deeper and faster could jeopardise frontline services and the social safety net.
To many on the right, this will sound like a bit of a cop-out given our spending increased 70-odd% under Labour and the coalition had only cut the public service by 3.3% in the first half of this year to a still-high total of 64,537.
And that’s where Act enters the group chat, hoping to push them further to the right and gain a genuinely outsized influence in the next Government.
Whether the Treaty Bill is the vehicle that drives them into poll position, only time will tell.
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