Voting for Opportunity could cement the right wing for another 3 years

As news emerges this morning that Starship has had to defer cancer surgeries due to a nursing shortage, the impacts of the right wing Coalition couldn’t be clearer

Qiulae Wong is a positive Ambassador for the Opportunity Party (TOP). A former KPMG management consultant, Wong is the daughter of Margaret Malcolm, who was a Senior Advisor to the National Party’s Judith Collins. Wong’s husband is a senior executive of a medical AI (Artificial Intelligence) software company.

Wong comes across as affable, articulate and presentable As she told media this week, she’s had a lot of experience in advocacy and public presentation, and it shows.

When TOP, or OP as they now like to be called, advertised for a leader through Seek in 2025, Wong emerged as the successful candidate.(Rumour hsa it that Wong reached out to Opportunity directly after receiving a newsletter in the email, learning about their search for a leader)

Opportunity under Wong is doing very well. Recent polls show them as the potential “Kingmaker” in Aotearoa New Zealand politics, coming in between 5-8% in recent polls.

Nearly 40% of Opportunity’s voters come from the left – Greens and Labour.

Around 17% come from the right.

Without a doubt, Opportunity have successfully split votes from the left, making the left vulnerable to a loss to National, NZ First and ACT this term.

Whether the left or right win Government, ultimately depends on the relative success of Labour or National, which although weakened, are still the country’s major parties.

And while Wong has kept her past political affiliations close to her chest, the party’s Deputy Leader made clear last month that he would vote National in 2026 if he wasn’t part of OP.

Officially, Luxon has ruled out working with Opportunity, but this is more of a cynical strategy to retain National voters and keep them away from Opportunity. It’s been successful in that regard.

But as Wong herself recognises, Luxon will pick up the phone should Opportunity cross the 5% threshold and they are needed.

And Wong makes clear that she will phone Luxon directly and quickly if National wins the most seats, in order to try to form Government with them.

As Wong told Pat and Chewie on BHN, Wong will do her best to form Government with whomever wins the most votes* on election day.

*Note: A day later, Wong updated this to which ever party wins the “most seats”, and says she will only wait for special votes if the win is marginal.

Readers of Mountain Tūī will remember that National’s new voter disenfranchisement laws this year passed under urgency, are expected to help National win 2 more seats than usual.

That’s because over 75% of NZ’s special votes are pre-enrolments and special votes inevitably favour the left. The total number of special votes in NZ surpassed ACT & NZ First total votes by ~100,000 if we use 2023 electoral numbers – i.e. it is a large proportion of the votes that is in the scope of this law.

Readers can also see Chris Bishop admit this in the video clip above.

i.e. National’s laws will disenfranchise tenss of thousands of Kiwis but could reliably help National to win the 2026 election by boosting their results by ~2 seats.

On a day like today, when New Zealand’s Starship hospital is delaying cancer procedures due to the ongoing public health and nursing crisis under this Government, my message to you could not be clearer:

Our top priority should be to remove the current right wing Coalition government.

Whether it has been this Coalition attempting to sell and commercialise 2/3 of conservation land (which by the way, Shane Jones swears is still underway by stealth with National), to them hiring only 54 FTE nurses over its entire term while trying to take credit for Labour’s thousands of nurse hires AND funnelling tens of millions to private healthcare and moving us closer to a USA style health system , to banning Te Reo Māori words in the education curriculum (even Aotearoa), to the PM’s back hand deals with Fonterra and Z Energy facilitated by lobbyists in his office, to the intentional obstruction of OIAs by Erica Stanford, to their actions to abolish media standards regulators that review and try to stem harm/disinformation in media, to allowing gang numbers to surpass police numbers, in the country while seeing gang profits double and police struggle to identify gang members, to a surging meth and cocaine crisis of 200-300%+, to the simple reality of 11 year unemployment highs and 25-30 year youth unemployment records while businesses fail in numbers we haven’t seen for a decade, to losing over 161,000 net, young and working age Kiwi citizens in less than 3 years, to bringing back deep sea trawling and cementing NZ as only one of five nations that refused to ratify the non-binding UN Pandemic Prevention Declaration, to cutting benefits of Kiwis with mental and health disabilities, to the endless deceptive messages that we have seen this term.

Can Aoteraoa New Zealand afford 3 more years of this Coalition government?

If your answer is no, my personal recommendation is do not vote for Opportunity.

And if they do make the threshold, which is still very likely, and they form a part of a new Government, hold them to account and remember, it’s the easiest thing in the world to be a minority party and make big promises that appeal to a minority.

If you don’t believe me, just ask Winston Peters.

Happy Election 2026 and remember, enroment closes this year on 25 October, 2026.

Whatever the result, be well and happy, Whanau.