Guyon Espiner

You've got most polls still saying the coalition will win, but some polls are saying that the coalition will lose.

The short answer is it's probably going to be one of the closest elections that we've had under the MMP system.

Labour's policy at the moment, and it's probably a politically astute one, is that the coalition and in particular the Prime Minister Christopher Luxon is very unpopular and a vote for Labour is a vote to get the coalition and Christopher Luxon out of power.

Labour's pitch doesn't seem to be vote for Labour because Labour's great.

They're sort of running an implicitly negative anti-coalition campaign, which is not a...

a politically astute and probably justifiable thing to do when the Prime Minister is as unpopular as he is now.

Yes, they are deliberately running what you call a small target campaign.

It's very common, very common in Australia.

It's becoming more common in New Zealand, is to run on a very light policy platform.

Because when you run on a lot of policies, you get stuck in the weeds.

You have to get people explaining the policies.

Obviously, you're just an opposition party of, you know, 30-odd MPs or whatever, and a small research unit.

You haven't thought of everything.

And all of a sudden, someone, you know, doorstops you and said, have you thought about this in relation to your policy?

You know, if you do this policy, well, then the sky will fall in in this particular industry.

And some MP sort of says, actually, you know what, I haven't thought about that.

Maybe our policy isn't a very good idea after all.

That happens overseas.

It happened in the 2019 Australian election where they ran on some quite sort of complicated tax reforms and it all fell apart on the campaign.

And they lost an election they might have otherwise won.