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- Date published:
10:11 am, September 18th, 2026 - 12 comments
Categories: election 2026, Opportunity Party, TOPS -
Tags: Citizens Income, GMI, ubi
No. They’re not right wing either. People are trying to fit them into L/R boxes, but they don’t fit. They’re progressive centrists of the like we haven’t seen before, orthogonal1 to the traditional Left/Right spectrum. This is not the centrism of Peters or Dunne.
Some might ask why people on the left are against OP’s land value tax. Isn’t taking money from the rich and giving to the poor a good thing?
Whole system design policy
First let’s understand that like the Greens, OP presents policy within whole system design. We can’t understand the LVT policy without understanding the UBI policy and OP’s kaupapa on how to create a good New Zealand. But equally we should apply our own whole systems thinking. We can’t understand OP’s version of a UBI without looking at its genesis, all the way from Gareth Morgan’s anti-beneficiary, anti-welfare original design. For historical context and philosophical underpinnings, I’ve written critiques of TOP UBI policies in the past.
The main selling point of the package is that the Citizen’s Income UBI version would free up beneficiaries and low wage earners from the punitive, demeaning aspects of our current social security system, while giving people who can work and find jobs better standing in the precariat. The UBI would be tax-free, and beneficiaries would no long be penalised for being in a relationship, for taking on casual or part time work, or for having assets.
Wealthier people would pay more tax so not benefit financially from the CI in the same way, and middle income workers would have something to tide them over if they lose their jobs or are transitioning.
That’s assuming OP in a centre left government. But once those bad things are abolished, we also lose the good, including our current legislation that gives beneficiaries entitlements. When the right are in power again, they can change the conditions of a UBI. Any UBI that isn’t tory-proofed is a huge risk.
But even with the left, the policy is a problem. It doesn’t substantially increase the income of people who cannot work for whatever reason. It still blows my mind that beneficiaries who cannot work get the UBI to replace their existing income, whereas people who can work, get the UBI on top of other earnings.
Disabled people and young mums on benefits are particularly badly served here, but so are people who cannot find work.
Opportunity’s response to criticism is to say no-one will be worse off. That’s another way of saying we’re not going to raise people out of poverty if they cannot work. People who can work, and can find work, theoretically would do well out of the CI, and this is a big reason to consider a UBI.
But designing a policy that leaves a large number of people in poverty is both ideologically and economically unsound.
The Land Value Tax is regressive
Looking at the LVT aspect of the policy, a tax which is designed to pay for the above, we can see the same ideological underpinnings. While OP has improved their policy over the years from Morgan’s anti-beneficary position, it’s still wholly inadequate, and they’re not good at explaining it or the detail.
OP’s land value tax of 1.75% to be paid yearly is unaffordable for beneficiaries. Of note is that they would defer payments for elders, but not disabled people. The tax would be offset by the UBI for some people, but beneficiaries need the UBI to get out of poverty.
This screams of either not understanding how welfare works, or not particularly caring. Better to tax actual excess wealth, or capital gains at sale. See the Greens’ 2023 and 2026 tax policies.
The LVT policy further commodifies whenua instead of moving us to kaitiaki guardianship models, a kind of cementing in of neoliberal values rather than liberating us from neoliberalism.
The policy financially coerces low wealth people to move (if you can’t afford the LVT sell your house and buy something cheaper!). Often away from family, friends, support, schools, thus breaking down community and increasing travel/carbon miles.
Some argue we already have rates, and people are already highly mobile. Those are neoliberal arguments not leftist ones. Do we want strong communities who take care of the land or not? Do we want to remove welfare poverty or not?
The dilemma for the left
Lots to critique. Here’s the dilemma for the left. OP are consistently polling above 5%. The closer we get to the election and this is sustained, the more likely it is they will be in parliament, and hold the balance of power. In other words, the left will probably need OP to form government.
I rate Quilae Wong. She is smart, interviews well, has a calm presence and is socially intelligent. Parliament would be improved by her presence. I say that knowing she is not leftist, and much of OP’s policy is progressive neoliberal.
I know little about the rest of the party candidates, but while their policy is often flawed their kaupapa is often a good complement to that of parties to the left of them. I’m not saying vote for them (I’m not going to), but we do need to think strategically about the situation and how it might play out. The ideal outcome at this point is a Labour/Green government with OP on the cross benches to give them time to learn the ropes before being part of a government arrangement. But it may be that the voters’ choice is L/G with OP providing Confidence and Supply.
Green Party and OP policies for comparison. The Greens design from a social welfare pov, OP design from an economics pov.
https://www.greens.org.nz/policy
https://www.opportunity.org.nz/policy
IMO….they maybe try to present as such? And there has obviously been much market research on how that presentation should be targetted.
IMO anyway, they seem very much…Teal. And there aint nothing Left about any of previous NZ Teal iterations I have seen. Also an indepth look at who, and what, is behind it all, informed me that is still the case here.
Totally agree Weka, beneficiaries and retired folk with their own home but not much else in the bank should be deeply dubious about TOP
So what's the alternative, Alan? That the rest of the tax base continues subsidising the accumulation and retention of increasingly valuable land, at enormous cost?
I agree that the land-rich but cash-poor problem is real, and it needs to be addressed.
But at some point we have to confront the other side of the equation too. If we want to tax productive activity less and accumulated wealth more, somebody who owns a valuable asset but has little income is inevitably going to be one of the difficult cases.
Qui bono?
The intent of the policy is to tax all property owners – in order to benefit working class non homeowners.
The effect is to overwhelmingly penalize the 65+ age bracket (increased tax, no increased income) with over 80% homeownership.
To benefit the under 40 age bracket (who are not homeowners).
Millennials against Boomers.
And they still haven't addressed the elephant in the room. What is to stop landlords just hiking the rent to cover the new tax?
If you want to take the value out of land, you do it when it's being sold- and people have the money to pay the tax. Stamp duty, etc.
Mind you, that's no guarantee to keep property prices under control.
The only thing that has ever been reliably shown to work is supply and demand. Increase supply, or decrease demand, and prices stabilize or fall.
Well it can be offset against the future sale , and if the land increases in value as fast 2% per annum it would actually not be a cost in the long run ,
I think that, if both Lanour and National hadn't ruled TOP's land tax out – we'd be seeing massive swings to NZF from retirees scared to lose their homes.
I agree with Weka that TOP doesn't really fit neatly into the traditional left/right spectrum. I'm just not sure that it has to.
It seems a little strange to complain that the existing political settlement isn't up to the task, while simultaneously judging attempts to do something different through the categories that settlement gave us.
If we want something different, presumably we have to allow for politics that doesn't fit neatly into the old boxes.
But I agree with the conclusion. Whether TOP is neoliberal, left, right, progressive or regressive matters less to me than the fact that it represents a break from old-style politics and a willingness to reconsider parts of our economic and social architecture.
They don't come at that from the same place as the Greens, and they're going to reach different conclusions as a result. That's fine. Close enough is often good enough when it comes to coalition building.
As for the LVT, I agree there are real distributional problems to work through. But the fact that it may force some adjustment in patterns of land ownership is also precisely the point. I don't think we can simultaneously have an economy buoyed by land speculation and ever-rising property values, while also shifting the tax burden away from productive activity and towards accumulated wealth.
The genuinely difficult case is the land-rich but cash-poor owner, because that category exists at both ends of the dynamic. It includes people who happen to have lived for decades on land that has become enormously valuable, as well as people whose wealth is substantially the product of land ownership. That's an argument for carefully designed deferrals and protections, not necessarily for preserving the underlying system.
Ditto for a UBI. I agree that whether it's enough matters enormously, particularly for people who can't work, and I'd be quite happy to see more generous supplementary support for those who need it.
But the underlying idea is still interesting: decoupling someone's basic ability to live from their ability to work. That's a fairly fundamental reconsideration of the architecture of the welfare state.
So I think there's plenty to argue about in TOP's particular settings, and Weka raises some good criticisms of them. I'm just less interested in whether the resulting package qualifies as properly left-wing. If we're serious about reconsidering the existing settlement, some of the answers are presumably going to come from outside the political categories that produced it.
Were they to form part of a Labour+Green government, there's some easy policy items all 3 can agree on:
– Compulsory superannuation, with contribution rates rising to 6% from each.
– Their renewable energy policies, both in the Capacity Investment scheme modelled on the Australian Federal one, and incentivising industrial process generation change, are pretty similar to the previous Labour-Greens government,
– Regulating lobbying including stopping the revolving door for a year between elected office and companies trying to change legislation, and a searcahble register of who's doing the lobbying and to whom.
– The Oceans policy. Not a huge vote winner, but they are seeking 30% of the NZ ocean as Marine Reserve, and shifting from single-species quotas to ecosystem-based approaches, raising the baseline measure for sustainable fish stocks, installing cameras on commercial fishing boats and phasing out bottom trawling.
I don't mean to quibble about where they fit on any spectrum as a whole, but those three areas are fully aligned with Labour and Greens and I'm pretty clear rule them out of fitting with Act, NZFirst, or National.
I'd really like to see Kiwisaver employer contributions being on top of salary, rather than part of the remuneration package.
Another point which I don't think has been raised is the effect on beneficiaries who rent (i.e. most of them).
If this policy goes ahead, and landlords have a new tax to pay it is absolutely inevitable that rents will rise to cover it. Now, this isn't likely to be too much of an issue for young workers flatting together – they've just received the UBI, which can be used to cover the rent increase (with a bit left over).
But that's not the case for beneficiaries. They won't be getting the UBI on top of their benefit – so no extra money coming in. How will they pay rent increases? I would argue that they can't, and will be excluded from housing (more than they are already).