New Zealand's final poll puts National one point ahead of Labour, with Opportunity Party holding the balance of power
The final 1News Verian poll before Saturday's election gives National 30% and Labour 29%, leaving neither bloc able to govern without the centrist Opportunity Party's seven seats.
New Zealand's election race has tightened into a genuine cliffhanger, with the final 1News Verian poll of the campaign putting the governing National Party just one point ahead of Labour days before voters go to the polls on Saturday.
The poll, released on Tuesday, gave Christopher Luxon's National Party 30 per cent of the party vote, up one point on the previous week, while Chris Hipkins' Labour Party rose two points to 29 per cent. The Greens climbed one point to 16 per cent, while National's two coalition partners both slipped: ACT fell two points to 10 per cent and New Zealand First fell two points to 8 per cent.
The centrist Opportunity Party was unchanged on 6 per cent, a figure that may prove decisive, while Te Pati Maori edged up to 0.4 per cent. When the results are carried to one decimal place, the gap narrows further still, with National on 29.5 per cent and Labour on 28.8 per cent.
Translated into seats in Parliament, the numbers leave neither of the two big blocs able to govern alone. The right-wing bloc of National, ACT and New Zealand First would hold 58 seats, with 36 for National, 12 for ACT and 10 for New Zealand First. The left bloc of Labour, the Greens and Te Pati Maori would hold 56 or 60 seats, depending on how the Maori seats are calculated, with 35 for Labour and 20 for the Greens.
In either calculation, the Opportunity Party, on seven seats, would hold the balance of power. Both the right and the left would need its support to form a government, putting a party that has never before held seats in Parliament in the position of kingmaker.
The poll also showed the contest for preferred prime minister narrowing. Luxon slipped one point to 23 per cent, while Hipkins rose one point to 19 per cent, closing a gap that had widened the previous week. Green co-leader Chloe Swarbrick rose to 8 per cent, New Zealand First leader Winston Peters fell to 6 per cent, and ACT leader David Seymour stood at 5 per cent.
The survey was conducted between 29 October and 2 November among 1,006 eligible voters, half by mobile phone and half through an online panel, with a maximum sampling error of about 3.1 percentage points. That margin alone is larger than the one-point gap between the two leading parties, underlining how close the race genuinely is.
More than a million people have already voted, and the share of undecided voters has fallen two points to 9 per cent in the past week, suggesting that the final days of campaigning will be fought over a shrinking pool of voters who have yet to make up their minds.
The leaders reacted in sharply different ways to the result. Luxon said the only poll that mattered was the one on Saturday, and promised to campaign hard until midnight on Friday to convince voters that his government's plan was working. Peters, by contrast, dismissed the poll outright, describing it as trash and humbug research.
The result also sits uneasily alongside other recent polling. A Reid Research poll for RNZ last week had Labour well ahead of National, at 31 per cent to 25 per cent, a reminder that different pollsters, methods and samples can produce very different pictures of the same race. Under New Zealand's mixed-member proportional system, which tends to favour coalition governments, the final outcome may therefore depend less on which party finishes first than on which bloc can assemble a working majority after Saturday.
With four days of campaigning left, both sides are now chasing every last vote. The jockeying inside the governing coalition has added another complication, with ACT and New Zealand First backing vote-splitting tactics that National strongly opposes. Whatever happens on Saturday night, the shape of the next government is likely to be decided not on election night alone, but in the coalition negotiations that follow it.
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