Guyon Espiner

to remind voters, in their words, that the only way to keep Labour out of the beehive is to vote for National.

Now, New Zealand First, I think realising that that is a massive issue for them, have been very unambiguous, more unambiguous than usual.

You'll remember that in the past, you know, Winston Peters has not been ruling people in and out.

He's not playing that game.

He wants a bit of ambiguity.

I could go, you know, this way or the other.

This time around, for the second time, he did this a wee bit in 2023, with regard to not working with Chris Hipkins.

This time around, he's been very, very clear, I'm not going with Labour after the election.

This version of the Labour Party is not my cup of tea.

So I think you can guess from that, that the attack that National has made, that Winston could go once again with Labour, that that attack has really landed, because New Zealand First has really drawn a line under it.

The National Party was formed to keep Labour out of power, and that is their driving ambition.

And so I think I would find that these parties exist partly to oppose each other.

One thing I suppose that's interesting about our parliament is we're an MMP system.

But we still have a kind of first-past-the-post mentality, and you're seeing that in this election, where actually, you know, you can vote for any number of parties, but ultimately, all New Zealanders are going to go to the polls, most New Zealanders are going to go to the polls this election, voting for the left team or the right team.

We were sort of saying when the election date was set that it seemed smart to set a late election date because the economy was looking like it was going to recover.

That would probably mean a more benign environment to fight an election if you're the incumbent government who is in charge of the economy.

And given that most polls at the beginning of the year gave the incumbent government just a slight edge over the opposition,

A slight edge plus an improving economy probably translated into a victory for the coalition.

Now that's, you know, who really knows who's going to win an election.

But that was just sort of baseline scenario.