First polls of 2025 show coalition losing

The Kākā by Bernard Hickey

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First polls of 2025 show coalition losing

Curia & 1News polls confirm Talbot Mills poll putting Opposition ahead of National-ACT-NZ First, while Luxon's popularity falls & voters see NZ on wrong track; Luxon & Seymour at loggerheads

Bernard Hickey

Feb 10, 2025

145

Transcript

As support continues to fall, Luxon also now faces his biggest internal ructions within the coalition since the election, with David Seymour reacting badly to being criticised by the PM. File photo: Lynn Grieveson / The Kākā

Long stories short, the top six things in Aotearoa’s political economy around housing, climate and poverty on Tuesday, February 11 are:

Polls out overnight from Curia and Verian confirmed last week’s reading from a Talbot Mills’ poll that combined support for the governing coalition of National, ACT and New Zealand First fell behind the combined support for Labour, Green and Te Pāti Māori in the first six weeks of 2025;
The polls also showed voters thought the governing coalition had put the country on the wrong track to the greatest extent since well before the 2023 election, while personal support for Christopher Luxon as preferred Prime Minister has fallen to record lows since he became Prime Minister;
Also this morning, Luxon faces his biggest internal ructions within the coalition since the election, with David Seymour reacting badly last night to Luxon’s comments late yesterday that Seymour had been ‘ill advised’ to write a letter in Police in support of his constituent Philip Polkinghorne;
Unions and tech experts have called for official inquiries into the safety and privacy of Health NZ’s IT systems after the new IT boss there told the 1,000 staff she was sacking that “failing often and failing early is the way to succeed,” RNZ reported last night;
Former ACT party advisor and now-Auckland University economist Robert MacCulloch has written a scathing Op-Ed in The Post detailing the internal workings of the governing coalition’s relationship between National and ACT titled: “The core reason why the Coalition is failing;” and,
Donald Trump said overnight the United States would impose a 25% tariff on all aluminium and steel imports, including those from Canada, Mexico, Australia, Japan and New Zealand, which would send an immediate inflationary burst through US food and manufacturing supply chains, preventing US interest rates from being cut, which would hold New Zealand fixed mortgage rates up. Reuters

(There is more detail, analysis and links to documents below the paywall fold and in the podcast above for paying subscribers. If we get over 100 likes from paying subscribers we’ll open it up for public reading, listening and sharing.)

Polls show voters see Luxon’s coalition on the wrong track

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon came back early from his summer holiday in the first week of January to rejig his Cabinet and pivot to a pure ‘Growth, Growth, Growth’ strategy, aiming to get ‘Back on Track’ — again. But within days he was embroiled in controversies of his coalition partners’ choosing and looking increasingly shrill with his ‘hustle harder’ exhortations to an economy that remains uncooperatively stuck in a recessionary rut early in 2025.

Voters don’t buy either the cabinet reshuffle or the shouting at the economy to start growing, according to three polls taken in the first six weeks of 2025, including two published last night.

The Taxpayers Union-Curia poll and the 1News-Verian polls confirmed last week’s reading from Talbot Mills’ that combined support for the governing coalition of National, ACT and New Zealand First fell behind the combined support for Labour, Green and Te Pāti Māori, which would result in a change of Government if an election was held now.

Here’s the key charts and details:

**Taxpayers Union-Curia** poll of 1,000 voters via mobile, landline and online from February 2nd through February 4th.

**1News-Verian** poll of 1,000 voters from Feb 3rd through Feb 7th

‘And you’re on the wrong track too’

Both polls showed voters thought the Government was on the ‘wrong track’ in a net sense, with the Curia poll showing net wrong track measure of minus 15.8%, which is the worst levels since late in the previous Labour Government and down 1.8 points from January. The 1News-Verian poll asked the question for the first time and found a net 11% saying it was headed in the wrong direction.

Moving fast and breaking the health system

An extraordinary story was published yesterday on RNZ about comments from Health NZ’s new head of IT, Dr Lara Hopley, in a webinar for staff (see below), including the 1,000 being sacked out of 2,000 workers in IT.

Hopley talked in the video on 4 December about having to save $99m from data and digital, while facing the prospect of "further under-resourcing".
She then stated the number one problem was "waste". The solution included to "fanatically minimise waste" and to fail often.
"Failing often and failing early is the way to succeed ... failing early is a sign of success in and of itself," Hopley told staff. RNZ