Perspective with Andrew Dickens: Will TOP ever be more than a sideshow?

Author: Newstalk ZB,
Publish Date: Tue, 4 Aug 2026, 6:37pm

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The Opportunity Party leader Qiulae Wong at Napier Golf Club. Photo / Jack Riddell

Everybody's talking about the Opportunity Party and I'm not quite sure I believe they're anything more than a bit of a sideshow. They haven't cracked 5 percent yet but anyway, there we go.

Sir Ian Taylor wrote an opinion piece that was published by Stuff. In it, he said that throughout his life he's been a centre-left voter. That's been his political home. But during the whole Covid period, with the Labour Party's response to Covid and the way it wasted its supermajority when it had, you know, all the power in the House, he became disillusioned.

He started talking to people from the National Party and saw that they were having conversations. They were talking to business as well and he says that's what he wanted. He didn't want a party telling him what to do in the way he felt Labour did. So he changed his allegiance, after a lifetime, to the National Party.

But now he's becoming disillusioned with National as well, because he believes the tail is wagging the dog. He thinks that, on issues such as the Treaty Principles Bill, pay equity, school lunches and so on, ACT and New Zealand First have too much power. He even suggests that Winston Peters has more influence in the coalition Government than Christopher Luxon and the National Party.

So he's disillusioned with them too, and he's starting to say, "I'm flirting with Opportunity because they want to have a conversation." That's what their leader has said: "I want to get away from tribalism."

Sir Ian has found himself hacked off with the Labour Party, hacked off with the National Party and hacked off with the whole MMP system. He's been quite beguiled by Opportunity, which says it wants to have a conversation.

Now, the problem I have with that is that you don't vote for a party simply because it isn't one of the other two parties that have dominated politics for the past 40 years. You don't vote for someone because you don't want to vote for someone else. You vote for them because of the policies they have.

And with Opportunity, as soon as they mentioned a universal basic income, I thought, "Well, I'm out." I've been reading about universal basic income for 30 years. I don't believe it's going to work. Many economists say it's not going to work. Then they added a land tax and I thought, "Well, that's not going to work either."

In fact, as we've seen in the costings, all of this is going to cost the country an enormous amount of money. So I'm not voting for Opportunity. It's a sideshow. Sure, it's getting some publicity but I was amazed that Sir Ian Taylor, like too many New Zealand voters, seems to vote for people simply because they're not the people he doesn't like anymore.

And that's his only reasoning.

Crazy.

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