Christopher Luxon has presided over the loss of both, and the reason isn’t hard to fathom. A rule-out that keeps centre-right voters from straying to Opportunity sends a signal to National’s core constituency not to stray from the fold. Likewise, an enrolment deadline that falls hardest on the young and on Māori, who aren’t National’s base, serves the same purpose.
On 27 July the Prime Minister told reporters that the National Party wouldn't "do business" with anyone seeking to impose new taxes, and his office affirmed that Opportunity was therefore ruled out. Stuff counted nineteen occasions on which he repeated that he would not work with the new kids on the block, nineteen statements that we're all now just meant to forget about as if they never happened.
Then Opportunity won six percent of the provisional party vote, and Luxon was soon refusing to repeat his previous position while professing a newfound wish for a "relationship" with Opportunity leader Qiulae Wong. A rule-out that lasts only until the votes are counted isn't a principle. It's campaign tactics designed to mislead voters.
On Monday 27 July, 1News reported:
Luxon appears to rule out National working with Opportunity Party
National Party leader Christopher Luxon appears to have ruled out governing arrangements with the upstart Opportunity Party, saying his party didn't want to "do business" with anyone seeking to impose new taxes.
Opportunity has hovered just below the 5% party vote threshold for entering Parliament in a wide variety of surveys, including last month's 1News Verian poll.
Luxon was asked by media today whether he could coalesce with the party.
"Well, I'm just saying to you, they want to increase taxes," he responded. "We're a party of low tax. It wouldn't be surprising to any of you to say we don't think we want to do business with them ... we wouldn't be working with them."
Much of the coverage of the reversal has been almost as telling as the reversal itself. The Herald described a softening of his stance and an olive branch to a party he had repeatedly criticised.
The Post led with his pledge to cultivate a relationship, and reported that Erica Stanford and Mark Mitchell said he would phone Wong despite his previously documented categorical rule-outs. This is the vocabulary of diplomacy, cushioning what is plainly a retreat of what Luxon emphatically stated.
On Sunday 8 November, the NZ Herald reported:
Luxon first ruled out working with Opportunity in July, and has done so countless times during the election campaign. Asked if he was about to go back on that stance, Luxon said it was “highly unlikely”.
“As we currently stand today, we don’t need Opportunity to form a Government,” he told reporters this afternoon.
Luxon’s stance has softened, however, with an olive branch extended to the party he’s repeatedly criticised.
The habit began in July, when 1News (the main promoter of Gareth Morgan's Opportunity Party) headlined the rule-out as something Luxon "appears" to have done, even after his office again confirmed it was formal. Plainer words such as reversal, backflip or even lie would have served readers better.
To be fair, not every outlet was so accommodating: Stuff's live coverage noted that Luxon repeatedly avoided directly answering questions about the Opportunity Party.
Nor is this an isolated lapse. In the 14 October leaders' debate, Luxon was asked whether he had ever lied to the public, and said no. Unfortunately for the PM, Newsroom's fact-check laughably found his claim to be false. Researcher John Wilcox went further, checking Luxon's statements against Stats NZ data, Treasury forecasts and Auditor-General findings, including his declaration of a united caucus on the day a leadership challenge emerged. Clearly Mr Luxon has a problem with telling the truth.
Then there's the Mowbray affair. Harry Mowbray's Split Your Vote campaign encouraged National supporters to give their party vote to ACT or New Zealand First. And now we have some commentators even trying to convince the public that the vote splitting campaign didn't cost anything and wasn't very effective anyway, despite the obvious additional seats the coalition of chaos won, with Parliament even needing alterations to accommodate.
The Mowbrays, the wealthiest family in New Zealand, have been significant National Party donors and we already know that ACT and NZ First approved the strategy, also promoting it with advertising. Although there isn't currently any evidence showing that Chris Luxon also supported it, the National Party have clearly been the main benefactors.
On Friday 30 October, 1News reported:
ACT, NZ First approved split-vote campaign – National lodges complaint
Businessman Harry Mowbray’s Split Your Vote campaign encouraged voters to give their electorate vote to National and their party vote to ACT or New Zealand First.
In a statement to 1News, a National Party spokesperson said the Split Your Vote campaign was a “deliberate attempt” to confuse voters in an already tight election.
“This particular campaign did not comply with the election rules everyone has to operate under. We referred it to the Electoral Commission, but we doubt we were the only ones,” the spokesperson said.
It now appears that National has won a whopping 42 electorates on only 29 percent of the party vote and gained seven overhang MPs. If they wanted to divert attention away from their own involvement in the vote splitting campaign, making a complaint to the Electoral Commission, when they knew others would do the same, would be a good diversionary tactic.
Then there's the enrolment changes, which perhaps deserve the sharpest scrutiny. The controversial Electoral Amendment Act closed enrolment 13 days before election day, ended same-day enrolment and extended the prisoner voting ban.
On Wednesday 4 November, Te Ao Māori News reported:
Voters miss out due to barriers
Community leaders cite new rules, online hurdles and confusion as Māori and Pasifika miss the ballot
Eligible voters are missing out on casting their vote, according to community members who spent time in their neighbourhood door-knocking before the new enrolment deadline.
Ethan Bidois (Ngāti Ranginui), a Glen Innes community member, says confusing enrolment rules, new laws and online hurdles have been a barrier to Māori and Pasifika in the area.
“Particularly if they’re kaumātua, they won’t understand sometimes how to enrol. Particularly online, we’ve come across people who just don’t understand the systems,” says Bidois.
At the end of October, 307,991 eligible voters weren't enrolled. Many voters who missed the 25 October deadline were turned away at the booth, and the number of people turned away because their enrolment was incorrect or late won’t be reported with the final result, a travesty that makes it look like a coverup. Others were allowed to vote, but their votes won’t count. Staff were reportedly advised to issue special votes to unenrolled people who were persistent, angry or demanding to vote, and the Electoral Commission has said a vote from someone who isn’t enrolled will be disallowed, or in other words thrown in the bin. The Commission expects about 55,000 disallowed special votes, more than five times as many as in 2023.
There were also reports of Māori voters walking away after voting places ran out of Māori electorate papers. Te Pāti Māori said it had received copies of formal complaints from Ōtaki, Porirua and New Plymouth. The Electoral Commission said it wasn’t aware of any voting places running out, although it acknowledged errors at booths where Māori voters were incorrectly told they needed an EasyVote card.
Previously the Commission had forecast about 700,000 special votes, but its preliminary estimate is now about 400,000, and the total may still change. The government said the law change would cut special votes, so a fall was always expected, but such a large number of Kiwis being disenfranchised raises the question of how many people never reached the ballot box, how many eligible New Zealanders were incorrectly turned away, and just how undermined our democracy has become because of these changes?
Turnout was 74.6 percent, against 78.2 percent in 2023, on track to be the second lowest in New Zealand history. Hipkins puts those shut out at about a quarter of a million, and Chlöe Swarbrick, after bearing the brunt of the National Party's negative campaign, has accused Luxon of lying about the enrolment changes.
On Monday 9 November 2026, RNZ reported:
Swarbrick accuses Luxon of 'voter suppression' and lying about enrolment change
Swarbrick told Campbell this year's election "left a sour taste in a few people's mouths".
"It was a deeply cynical election ... we saw the government knowingly indulge in voter suppression," she said.
"Anybody, hopefully even those on the far right of politics, can understand just how slippery a slope it is if we start to justify taking away people's ability to easily and accessibly engage in our democracy."
You can really see why the right wing are moving to financially cripple that news outlet, making good on the threats from Winston Peters after he received some unflattering reporting from them.
The government says the changes cut special votes and speed up the count, but this is clearly untrue. Whether they shifted the result is yet to be proven, and final figures aren't yet in. But the burden of proof lies with the government that made voting harder to show that their changes were actually justified or simply implemented to try and ensure their victory.
A rule-out no longer repeated within hours, a debate denial that clearly doesn’t survive scrutiny, and an electoral system that critics say is tilted against the least advantaged. Mr Luxon asks to be trusted, and the record gives New Zealanders every reason not to.
