Opinion polling for the 2023 New Zealand general election - Wikipedia
Opinion polling for the 2023 New Zealand general election - Wikipedia
I find the detail of this Wikipedia page to be amazing. It was shared 2 months ago (thanks @SamC). The main things that have changed since then are a continued slight dip in Labour/National and a slight rise in Maori/ACT.
If you have the time and energy then remember to read the policy proposals by the parties that you don't like as well as the parties that you do like.
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My takeaway from looking at these results is that both major parties are a bit shit. I don’t think coalitions on either side will help much either, and people are always too scared of voting for someone different (e.g. TOP) to do anything about it.
My takeaway is that people of NZ are sick and tired of falling house prices, low unemployment, competent management of the economy, stronger unions, competent management of unexpected natural disasters and terrorist attacks etc. They are sick and tired of signing free trade deals with the largest economies in the world.
They are just done with all that want to get rid of anybody who had any part in that.
Its going to be interesting to see how elections play out over the next 20 years or so as more and more people raised on FPP age out of our voting pool. In another 5 years people who first voted since 1998 will be between 18-60 years old and may be the majority of the voting populace by then (depending on how turnout rates change).
I suspect that those voters are more inclined to see coalitions as a normal and good thing for representation so we might see the two broad parties split a little bit and become more focussed. Labour are a centre-left and centrist party slapped together. National has elements of being centre-right, far-right and religious fundamentalist.
If those two parties split and really adopted those identities proper I think it would give voters more choices to find parties that really represent them. What could happen in a scenario like that is more coalitions forming around the centrist parties - rather than what can happen at the moment where an ostensibly centrist voter's party choice is dragged far further left or right than the voter intended due to the outsized influence small parties can have if its the only way to form a government.
ie in some ways 20+20+20 is better than 55+5.
I much prefer this idea. As it currently stands I find it very hard to vote as it seems no party is quite what I’m after. More choice could be interesting, my only concern being that we’d just end up with more compromise and less progress.
I’d love to see a more data driven government that ran small experiments based on science rather than ideology. For example I assume most people agree child poverty is bad, but it ends up being a big debate about who’s ideology is right to fix it. Run some experiments. See what works. Look at what’s operated internationally. I would love to see politics as a more collaborative activity but at the moment they mainly seem to focus on owning the opponents rather than working together.
I think you would see more compromise, but the truth is that happens already - so instead of the compromise being adopting some of Act's most extreme positions (anathema to me) or vice versa with the Green's (something many farmers might rage against) the compromises would be to not go too far, not do too much.
In a way it would see the sort of change that Jacinda Ardern favoured - slow and steady, take the people with you rather than the sort of change that David Seymour would champion which is more I have the power right now so all this is happening right now.
For a lot of people that sort of stability would be beneficial - but for others, including people who need change most, it would happen far slower than it might now. So its really whether you want rapid change that swings from side to side until it stabilises into an electoral compromise over several elections, or one election and more minor change over a single term.