Guyon Espiner

And I think if you'd argue that point, people would say, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Yes.

So we'd survived till 2025, turned into survive 25.

And now we're in the sticks in 26.

And then obviously when we had that conversation, the Iran war hadn't happened.

The US and Israel hadn't invaded Iran.

And now we're in the situation where actually the economy has had three or four years of really difficult times.

We've had declining to stagnant house prices for four years, which is probably a good thing from a social perspective, affordable housing.

It's probably a bad thing from a sentiment perspective because two-thirds of New Zealand households own their own homes and they feel pretty bad when those homes decrease in value.

We're going to have higher interest rates this year.

The OCR, the official cash rate, is going to go up.

That means higher mortgage rates, which makes the third of households with a mortgage who tend to be swing voters, that makes them feel pretty bad.

So I think you'd have to look at the data points.

economically and say, well, the economy's actually not going to help the coalition this year.

The economy's probably going to drag the coalition's support backwards, actually.

The polling's telling us that people feel bad about the economy, and the economists are telling us that the economy's probably going to get worse before the election and not better.

So, I'm just taking a wee bit of a wild goose chase.

to give you the very unsatisfying answer, which is I really don't know.

I think it's good to speak in probabilities.

At the beginning of the year, the probability was probably that the coalition had a better odds of winning than losing, and now it honestly looks like a toss-up.