Assorted thoughts on the Opportunity Party

Writing them down before they get corrupted by partisanship

After a lifetime of non-partisanship, tomorrow I will attend a political rally for the first time. I therefore wanted to record my positions—most importantly critiques—on the party before my mind has the opportunity¹ to be corrupted by its partisans.

This isn’t a particularly coherent essay. Its main purpose is to act as a sort of time capsule, so that if my opinions change as a result of having contact with party members, it’ll be clear how.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

General philosophy

Evidence and boldness

My foundational critique of the Opportunity Party’s philosophy has always been that it presents itself as both evidence-based and willing to propose bold solutions to long-standing problems. While both laudable, I claim that these two ideals are in tension.

A rigorous evidence base requires some jurisdiction to have tried the policy in question—in fact, not just one, but at least a few. You need prior cases to be able to study its real-world impacts. It’s possible to gather some evidence without this—you can code simulations, you can run small-scale trials, you can extrapolate from lesser versions of the policy—but they won’t be substitutes for real-world data.

A bold idea is one that status-quo politicians have been too feeble to propose. This means, by definition, that no or maybe only one jurisdiction has tried it. If it’s a well-traversed idea, then it doesn’t deserve to be called “bold”. But if it’s one that hasn’t been tried much, then there can’t be much evidence for it.

(There is a middle ground: ideas that have partial evidence giving rise to policies that are likely to work but haven’t been tested in that form. But I couldn’t tell that that’s what they were going for.)

The defence of the party here would be that it hasn’t really rested its identity on “evidence” since the Gareth Morgan days in 2017. Its rhetoric since 2020 has been more about courage and ambition. This election it adds co-operation, casting itself as an antidote to the recent rise in tribal politics. Its charter still says to “follow evidence over ideology”, but it would nowadays be a misrepresentation to say that the party sees itself as “the evidence-based party”, except in the way that every party thinks itself evidence-based. So I guess the tension no longer applies.

Are they a left-wing party?

The first thing for me to say here is: I don’t really care.

I care a lot that they don’t make a habit of casting good-faith right-wing or left-wing parties as evil,² which they don’t. But I judge policy positions on their reasoning and nuance, not their left- or right-codedness.

But I have noticed a slight asymmetry. Right-wingers tend to attack Opportunity’s policies directly for being “left-wing”, whereas left-wingers merely point to Opportunity’s openness to returning Christopher Luxon to power. If your manifesto happens to coincide with a “left-wing” one, can you credibly claim not to be left-wing?

I think this charge is not well warranted. It largely revolves around a single policy—their “tax reset”. I haven’t seen such critics engage with the rest of their manifesto. Perhaps I’m guilty of just seeing what I want to see, but a decent chunk of their policies seem to be about unlocking business and innovation. I don’t really think their tax policy is left-coded either—more on this below.

I could perhaps see a left-wing tilt if you think that all environmental policies are left-wing. But the left shouldn’t have (and environmentalists shouldn’t want them to have) a monopoly on the environment. And environmental protection is kind of the point of a blue-green party, which believes in finding solutions that work with the market, not against it.

That said, although I think Qiulae Wong has shown herself to be well-prepared for questions asking her to name common ground with the right, I can detect that she has to dig just slightly deeper on this than for the same question about the left.

Tactical considerations

Wasted votes

With Opportunity having crossed 5% in multiple polls, this is less of a question now. But because this is intended to be a log of opinions at the time, I’m going to include this here anyway.

I’ve never really understood the concept of a “wasted vote”. In a strict technical sense, all votes except 120 are wasted—the pivotal 120 votes that got each MP through the next Sainte-Laguë quotient. Voting is an exercise that works if everyone does it together; there’s not much value in thinking about this in terms of direct impact.

I suppose what people might instinctively mean is how “close” their vote is to being pivotal, or more precisely, how small the smallest set of votes (including them) is such that, if they weren’t there, the outcome would have changed. But in that case, I’d say the most valuable votes are the ones closest to the 5% threshold—there’s no vote more influential than the one that makes or breaks six MPs!

(More generally, I think people shouldn’t stress too much about the “best way” to use their vote. The best way to use your vote is however you want to use it.)

(For the record, I still consider the 5% threshold to be an abomination.)

But Christopher Luxon ruled them out!

I’m calling his bluff. If the day after the election, he has to choose between relegating his party to the opposition benches and picking up the phone, I can’t imagine that he’d choose the opposition benches.

Policies

This isn’t a deep dive into their entire manifesto—just a few bits I’ve noticed more than others.

Also, while I’ll be making some assessment of policies, that isn’t my objective. I stand by my scepticism of policy-by-policy evaluations as a voter. But occasionally policies can serve as something of a litmus test, or give you some idea of how the party “thinks” (to the extent that a party can “think”). Think of this as more general commentary than an attempt to offer a verdict on the policies.

Public transport

Having just told you I won’t offer any verdicts, I will render just one. Their policy to make public transport free is the dumbest in their manifesto.

As I understand it, most transport economists say that lower fares do little to convert car drivers to public transport users. Rather, frequency and reliability are much bigger factors. Of course it’d be nice to be cheap, frequent and reliable, but in any world where you have a finite budget, they trade off against each other. Money that you’re spending subsidising travel, you’re not spending on upgrading services.

The party describes this policy as a “high‑return infrastructure investment, not a giveaway”. This makes no sense at all! It’s quite literally a subsidy for operational costs. They call it an “operating expense” in their full policy document. They say it will cost $150 million. Any thoughtful advocate of public transport would rather that money be spent investing in building and maintaining the infrastructure itself.

Infrastructure

Zooming out, most of their infrastructure plan revolves around the Infrastructure Commission’s 30-year plan. They’re right to tap into frustration about flip-flopping and vanity projects of the incumbent parties. Mercifully, if the infrastructure spokespeople at the Engineering New Zealand–Stuff debate are anything to go by, the incumbent parties are also cognisant of this, and have now pivoted to a more long-term, consensus-seeking approach.

So the party proposes mechanisms to “lock in” this plan, using legislation to protect it from political whims. I like the sentiment, but I’m sceptical that there is any formal mechanism that will achieve this. Or indeed any effective mechanism at all, other than actually getting a cross-party consensus. Opportunity promises to use its leverage to drive consensus and stop flip-flopping, which I would say is a more useful promise (albeit a more flimsy “policy”³) than a proposal to lock the plan into law.

Tax reset

Mr Luxon bases his labelling of Opportunity as “left-wing” on this policy. Chris Hipkins also summarily rules it out.

I’m fine with the major parties ruling it out, and the party seems to be too. Ms Wong says that her party realises a change of this scale won’t happen overnight, and wouldn’t be a priority in post-election negotiations. This is as it should be. It’s radical and needs a much longer discussion before serious steps in that direction.

But it’s never struck me as particularly left-wing. Historically, both a universal basic income and a land value tax had prominent advocates (or at least sympathisers) who were known for championing free markets (Milton Friedman for both,⁴ Adam Smith and Henry George for LVT). There’s certainly no economic consensus in favour of either policy, but there’s at least a case to be made, and it revolves around economic incentives.

A universal basic income prevents effective marginal tax rates from getting out of hand as conventional benefits abate: currently, if you’re on Jobseeker Support, for every dollar you earn above a threshold, your benefit drops by 70 cents, which combined with income tax of 10.5% makes for an effective marginal tax rate of about 80%. In 2005, then-National deputy finance spokesperson John Key called a similar quirk in Working for Families, an income support payment for low-to-middle-income working families, “communism by stealth”. With a UBI, there is no benefit abatement, so your marginal tax rate is what’s on the label. (Opportunity’s policy proposes a consequential simplification to income tax brackets, raising income tax to 28% for up to $50,000, essentially flattening the income tax structure—also a traditionally right-wing idea, if in this case offset by the UBI so that low earners are still better off.)

A land value tax has been a cute theoretical idea of efficiency-obsessed economists for ages. The idea is that the supply of land is fixed, so unlike other capital and labour, you don’t disincentivise economic activity by taxing it. Actually, my first introduction to this idea was from a libertarian explaining his utopian tax system to me while we were at university: ideally, there would only be a land tax,⁵ because land was the only thing you can’t credibly claim to have “earnt” by creating it. (The fruits of your labour are due to you, and selling them exchanges the “earning” for money; there was no “original maker” of land.) So I’d always assumed this was a right-wing idea.

(They’re not actually right-wing ideas—advocates come from both the left and right, but given that most commentary casts them as left-wing, I assume I don’t have to explain that part.)

The other reason their tax policy doesn’t strike me as left-wing is how the party talks about it. Opportunity talks about rewarding work (by reducing marginal tax) and encouraging investment in businesses (as opposed to land). To give one contrast, the Greens talk about (and in fact propose) taxing the “super-rich” and “tackling corporate greed”. I know partisans sometimes grumble about substance and rhetoric not matching, but I think everyone deserves to be taken in good faith at least prima facie, and in the cases where I do conclude there’s a disconnect, it’s because there’s something confusing about their logic. That’s not the case with either party here.

Are their tax policies a good idea? I don’t know. Under my general policy of not getting too hung up on agreeing with policies, I delegate my opinion on this question to technical experts. But they’re not obviously stupid, they take aim at very real problems with New Zealand’s incentive structures, and I try to reward parties willing to bring earnest ideas to the table. (I still wouldn’t recommend passing them overnight.)

1. All puns of this nature are strictly unintentional.

2. Save for those parties that in other countries would attract a cordon sanitaire, like the Rassemblement National, Alternative für Deutschland, Reform UK or One Nation.

3. Another reason not to be too preoccupied with policy in voting decisions—sometimes the most useful contribution you can make isn’t a “plan” you can write down on paper.

4. Friedman advocated a negative income tax, which is essentially equivalent.

5. Remember, in a libertarian’s paradise, the government funds only very basic legal and security functions like the courts and police, so you don’t need that much tax revenue.