Wong holds talks with Luxon and Hipkins, discusses bottom lines

Opportunity Party leader Qiulae Wong has met with National leader Christopher Luxon and Labour leader Chris Hipkins to discuss bottom lines and find common ground.

Christopher Luxon revealed today he hosted Qiulae Wong in his office for an hour last night, for what he described as a “very positive, very constructive, very good conversation”.

Luxon stressed that on the provisional numbers, he does not need Opportunity’s support to form a government, with National, Act and New Zealand First holding a very slim majority, but special votes are yet to be counted.

“One of my big takeaways from the campaign is that essentially I think Kiwis want more cross-party collaboration where we can,” he said.

“It was a great opportunity, as I said, to get to know her and to start to build a relationship together as well,” he said.

He said the pair talked about their motivations for being in politics, as well as discussing areas of agreement.

“A lot of their thinking on KiwiSaver is aligned with the National Party thinking on KiwiSaver, there are areas like AI where we want to work with many political parties around that, certainly infrastructure,” he said.

“There’s a number of areas of collaboration, there’s areas where we obviously have disagreement on tax and other things, but we didn’t get too detailed.”

Also in attendance at the meeting was National Party chief of staff Cameron Burrows and Opportunity Party chief of staff Iain Lees-Galloway.

Luxon campaigned unequivocally on not working with Opportunity, repeatedly ruling out any deal with the party throughout the campaign.

His stance has since softened, now saying he wants to “have relationships with other political leaders”.

Wong told the Herald that the pair discussed “some areas of common ground”.

“I think that we had a shared background in the private sector and he’d done some work in sustainability at Unilever and Air New Zealand, so we were talking about that quite a bit,” she said.

Asked whether she discussed her party’s five bottom lines, Wong said the pair “talked through them very broadly”.

“We didn’t kind of go through them as a checklist ... at the moment we’re not even in that kingmaker position, so we’re not having those kinds of discussions.”

“We talked about fisheries generally and the fact that that’s an area that they do care about and I think that there is some common ground there, we didn’t go into the specifics of whether they would meet that bottom line or not.”

Wong also said she met with Hipkins today, for what she called “a very similar kind of conversation”.

“Hipkins was asking us for a sort of better sense of what we want to achieve,” she said.

As for bottom lines, Wong said they were discussed “broadly” with Hipkins also.

“We reiterated that that is part of how we will approach those negotiations, yeah.”

“I think that there’s an alignment there particularly around some of the environmental stuff, we talked also about innovation and science as an area that we both care about,” she said.

She said she also wants to meet with the other party leaders, once they returned to Parliament.

Asked which Chris she preferred, Wong said she had “no favourites at this point, it’s still very early days”.

Ethan Manera is a Wellington-based journalist covering Wellington issues, local politics and business in the capital. He can be emailed at ethan.manera@nzme.co.nz.