NZ News
Kingmaker in waiting? Opportunity’s Qiulae Wong makes her mark in debate
nalysis – Winston Peters has spent three decades perfecting the art of being kingmaker. But last night, there were signs of a changing of the guard – with Opportunity’s Qiulae Wong making a compelling claim to the title.
It was on 12 October 1996 that New Zealand went to the polls for its first MMP election, finally breaking the stranglehold of the two big parties and granting Peters the balance of power.
So, it was fitting that, 30 years and one day later, the minor parties had the debate stage and spotlight all to themselves. And boy, did they make the most of it.
Each participant brought enthusiasm in spades to TVNZ’s Multi-Party Debate, testing their differences and trading barbs.
In the aftermath, ACT leader David Seymour held a can of Red Bull aloft, neatly capturing the extra energy injected since their last, almost-cordial confab at Stuff’s Kingmakers debate.
The contenders had plenty to be energised about. The 1News-Verian poll, released an hour before the showdown, put the parties’ combined support above 40 percent – an extraordinary slice of the electorate.
At the last election, the minor parties won just 31 percent of the vote. The election before that, 18 percent. And before that, a measly 15 percent.
No longer are these just fringe outsiders. They are pivotal parties, some of whom will wield considerable influence over the next government.
And according to the latest poll, the biggest bargaining chip could well belong to the newest player. Opportunity has surged to 8 percent, handing it the balance of power.
From the debate’s outset, its leader Qiulae Wong made clear her willingness to work with just about anybody on stage – even if the feeling was less reciprocal.
At various points, she was criticised or dismissed outright by every other participant. But the political neophyte largely held her own, appearing unfazed by the badgering and laughing off the insults.
The sharpest conflicts were with ideological opposite Winston Peters and her most alike, the Greens’ Chlöe Swarbrick.
TVNZ / Harley Peters
Peters invoked his decades of experience, even pointing out he’d met former Singapore PM Lee Kuan Yew, “unlike some people around here”.
The NZ First leader drew a deliberate contrast with Wong, describing her as having been around for only “five minutes”.
But Wong did not let the comments slide. She repeatedly challenged Peters, most forcefully over his comments on unity and diversity, which she labelled “really dangerous rhetoric”.
Nor did she retreat from her refusal to serve in a government with Peters as foreign minister, describing his remarks directed at Green MP Lawrence Xu-Nan as “clearly racist”.
One of the most instructive exchanges was with Swarbrick, when the exceptional moderator Tova O’Brien asked both leaders to explain what separated the Greens and Opportunity.
“The Green Party want to change the government,” Swarbrick shot back, before rattling off the “massive attacks” she said the coalition government had inflicted over the past three years.
Wong had a ready rejoinder too: “Imagine how many of those most egregious things … the Greens could have stopped if they were willing to work with National.”
That conveniently ignored that National was equally unprepared to work with the Greens. But it drove home a distinct difference – one party, prepared to act as a handbrake on “extreme ideas”, the other preferring to be an accelerator for its own.
Both leaders made their case clearly, and both have reason to be satisfied. Indeed, few of the participants will be particularly upset with how the night unfolded.
TVNZ / Harley Peters
Seymour was especially effective at carving out his own ground in a crowded field, repeatedly distinguishing ACT from its potential partners and opponents.
On several issues, he stood alone – the only leader prepared to back drug-testing beneficiaries, and the only one willing to defend the supermarkets.
Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi also delivered a more assured performance than in the first showdown, speaking directly to his party’s supporters.
His priorities are different too. While the other parties are battling over their share of the party vote, Te Pāti Māori is concentrating on winning electorate seats.
Waititi even suggested that strategy had done the Greens a favour: “You’re welcome, Chlöe.”
Ultimately though, the stakes were highest for Opportunity – dependent on clearing that five percent threshold.
The latest poll suggests the party has momentum, but last night’s debate proves it has some muscle too.
Latest News
Opportunities to mitigate multi-million-dollar RNZ budget blowout likely missed – experts
Multiple opportunities to identify and mitigate a multi-million-dollar budget blowout at RNZ appear have been missed, according to the former executive director at Audit New Zealand.
The public broadcaster on Monday revealed a near $12 million shock financial loss after a litany of financial blunders, which will now lead to sweeping job cuts.
The $11.8m loss is more than 25 times the $470,000 RNZ had expected to lose over the year to June.
CEO Paul Thompson took responsibility for the result, and said internal reports gave an inaccurate picture of the finances, meaning the scale of the loss only became clear in October.
RNZ’s former chief financial officer Hilary Parker resigned unexpectedly in early October.
The board said it would commission an independent review into what went wrong.
Independent contractor Stephen Walker, who left the Audit Office earlier this year, said the size of the loss was surprising, as was the length of time it took to identify it – months after the financial year ended.
Supplied / OAG
“Probably more of a concern is that they had seemingly been unaware that they were running up a significant deficit until they were in the preparation stage of their annual report in October.”
Walker said public entities typically produced monthly financial reports.
An interim audit also took place before the end of the financial year, he said, but if the organisation hadn’t identified significant losses at that stage, the auditor could also be in the dark.
“It seems that there’s a real weakness in forecasting and budgeting that’s occurred here and that the monthly accounts, when they’re produced, either haven’t identified these significant variances against budget or the magnitude of them really hasn’t come to light until right towards the end of the financial year,” Walker said.
“And really at that point, there’s no opportunity for the chief executive, the leadership team to take, and the board to take, any corrective action because the year has effectively been completed.”
Walker said the “significant miss” was difficult to account for given it was more than 10 percent of RNZ’s total funding.
He said based on RNZ’s annual report, financial complexity didn’t appear to be a factor.
“This $11.8m loss isn’t made up of one particular item … it seems to have been contributed to by a number of separate expense lines running over budget. So I don’t think it’s necessarily to do with complexity.”
Among the errors, RNZ wrongly counted $2m from land sales as income in its budget. Staff costs also came in $3.2m over budget, including $1.4m in redundancy payments.
Professor at Auckland University’s business school Norman Wong said based on media reports the issues identified were “significant and troubling”.
Supplied / University of Auckland
“But recognising the sale of land as income in their budget is a basic error that one would have expected to have been caught and corrected well before it got to this point.”
With funding reductions at RNZ over the past two years, Walker expected greater scrutiny of financial results.
“Virtually every public entity has had their annual budget reduced. And so you would expect … the leadership team on a monthly basis and board – I’m not sure how frequently the board will consider the information – but you would expect them to be interrogating the results on a regular basis throughout the year,” he said.
Walker said initiating an independent review was the correct course of action and that he’d want to understand what information the leadership team and the board were regularly receiving.
He said he’d “love to say” surprising financial results were rare, but conceded they occured on a semi-frequent basis during his time leading the Audit Office.
“The benefit of independent scrutiny by the Audit Office – and the auditors providing that support to the Auditor General – [is] that the reporting is fairly presented at the end of the year, whether it’s good, bad or ugly.”
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