Luxon pulls ahead as preferred PM

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

Opinion

The voting public doesn’t appear all that enthused about either of our major party leaders, when asked in surveys who their preferred prime minister is, but there has been a significant shift in polling this month in the balance of preferences — and it’s more bad news for Labour’s chances.

While support for the centre-right pairing of National and Act has ebbed a little this month, with most polls now showing they would require the support of NZ First to govern, National’s leader Christopher Luxon has pulled ahead of Chris Hipkins for the first time in two recent polls: by 26 percent to 23 percent in the 1News-Verian poll on Wednesday, and 24 percent to 19.1 percent in the Newshub-Reid Research poll last week.

It’s the first time a National Party leader has polled better than Labour’s leader in six years; it was a draw in the four other polls out this month.

Of course, we don’t vote for the leaders but they are very much in people’s minds when considering how to use their “two ticks”, for electorate MP and party.

Our two most prominent prime ministers of the past 15 years have also weighed in on social media recently trying to improve the prospects for their parties — something that is not allowed on election day but is fine now, despite early voting being under way and two-thirds of votes being cast early three years ago.

Early voting for New Zealanders overseas began last week and on Saturday Dame Jacinda Ardern posted to her 1.6 million followers on Instagram:

“It’s the first time since I started voting that I haven’t been involved in the campaign, but popping a ballot in the box felt just as important. You’ll all know where my ticks went (two ticks for Chippy and the Labour team every time) but I wanted to add this point — if you’re a Kiwi abroad, please vote . . .” and pointing people to overseas voting information.

There are potentially 700,000 overseas voters, half of them in Australia. As of last week, 78,000 Kiwis abroad were registered to vote.

Sir John Key chimed in this week with a coded message for voters to ditch NZ First and support National for a strong and stable government:

“The election result is far from certain. Imagine if we woke up on October 15 in limbo land. To make sure National has the numbers it needs to govern well for you, without lots of moving parts, make sure you party vote National.”

Harking back to the dark days of the Global Financial Crisis, he added: “We could only take decisive action because there was a clear result on election night and a strong mandate to get things done . . . Uncertainty means no action to fix the economy and lower your cost of living.”