Guyon Espiner

Wow, man, you're just declaring war, aren't you?

That's the big question that's being asked at the moment.

One of the issues for the National Party is that one of the reasons why they're polling so badly is not because people are fleeing National for Labour, which would be very bad for the coalition.

Some people clearly are fleeing National for Labour.

But it looks like a lot of vote is fleeing National for New Zealand first and possibly to axe, but mainly New Zealand first, which is putting...

New Zealand First to 10 or 15 points a percent in the polls which is very good for New Zealand First but this time when they were in government with Labour they were well below the five percent threshold and on their way to being birded out of parliament altogether so there is a big question over what is driving this massive support for New Zealand First National for some time now have held their tongues on this issue possibly for the stability of the coalition obviously they've got a budget which was being put together at the moment it's going to go to cabinet in the next couple of weeks

So when you're putting the budget together, tempers are pretty high already, so you don't want to aggravate things even more by having a big scrap in public.

But National has typically held its tongue and played nice and let the scrap mainly take place between the minor coalition partners.

It looks like, given this latest leadership wobble in the National Party, that National's decided, actually, you know what, we need to fight for our vote.

And if New Zealand First is going to try and steal our vote, we need to fight them to take it back.

And that's really interesting because we haven't actually seen that this term.

And New Zealand First has been able to raid National's party vote and not really get much clap back in response.

So last week we saw first Nicola Willis, the deputy leader of the National Party, and then staggeringly the National Party leader himself, Christopher Luxon, go on the radio.

And they found, this is the chink in Winston Peter Zama, is the fact that he has gone with Labour before, he's gone with Labour twice before.

They know, based on, I think, focus groups that they've done and some polling, that New Zealand First's vote at the moment is very right-wing.

Currently, you know, New Zealand First does swing a wee bit, they go left to right.

At the moment, their vote is a very centre-right vote.

And those centre-right voters probably do not want to think that New Zealand First might go with Labour after the election.

Their guess is that the people who are voting for New Zealand First at the moment would not want to wake up one day and find that New Zealand First has gone with Labour again.

And so they are raising the possibility that New Zealand First could do that.