Why Should You Vote Opportunity?

In the run-up to the 2026 election, Salient is interviewing all of the major parties to understand their responses to the issues students face. Here, Qiulae Wong, leader of the Opportunity party, pitches Opportunity. 

What is the biggest challenge facing students in New Zealand in 2026?

I think it’s the real lack of vision for this country. Things are tough, cost-of-living is tough, all of it is really challenging, and it doesn’t feel like there is much hope on the horizon either. I think we need an aspirational vision for the future to get through the tough times, and I think it’s what we're really lacking as a country right now.

So what is Opportunity proposing to support students?

We have proposed free public transport, which would make a big difference to students. We have our competition policy: we estimate New Zealand households could be saving $30 a week on simple things like groceries, electricity, and banking fees if we tackle competition in this country.

Longer term, our tax reset would support students in particular. Essentially it would mean everybody studying would have a student allowance with no hoops to jump through, which would massively decrease debt and support people to study. We also want to invest in the jobs, industries, and business for the future so young people can see the jobs they want to have and the world will be looking for will be in here in 20 to 30 years. 

Can you talk us through your tax reset?

So we want to have a land tax and a citizens income, which come together and attempt to shift the burden of tax off income and onto property. So the land tax is a 1.75 percent tax annually paid only on the value of the land and 0.5 percent  for rural land. We’re also one of the few countries in the world which don’t have some type of tax on property and I think a land tax is the most effective way to do so. It means rather than putting their money into property, people instead invest in the productive economy, like business and shares. The challenge we're trying to solve with this is how housing affordability has gone through the roof in New Zealand. It's currently around 7 times the household income to buy a house in New Zealand. In my parents' generation, it was three times. If we continue on the current trajectory it could be ten to fifteen. That’s unsustainable and we can’t have it continue. 

The other side is the citizens income. It’s essentially like a universal basic income, where each week all adults are paid $370. The idea there is to address our tangled and complex welfare system which is undignified for those receiving it, overly burdensome and expensive for us to administer, and traps people in poverty. A citizen's income gives people financial security; they know they’ll be able to put food on the table and pay rent, but $370 a week is not enough to live on, so you’re still going to want to go out and work. 

In 2023, a two-zone trip on Metlink cost a tertiary student $1.13 at peak time. Currently it costs $2.63, an increase of 132 percent. 50 percent of students get to Vic by public transport. You’ve already said you want to make public transport free; do you want to talk us through the mechanisms and reasoning?

We already subsidize public transport in this country quite heavily; the government pays for 90 percent of the cost of public transport. And we've already spent over a billion dollars on a national ticketing system which we haven't even implemented. So we could just give people public transport for free and not have to spend that money on consultants implementing a ticketing system! There would be so many positive flow-on benefits from free public transport. Young people being able to get to university and that not being a barrier to studying, people being able to get to the hospital, reducing emissions, reducing congestion on our roads. Obviously, there would be a small increase in cost due to maintenance and running of a system with more people using it, but we think considering the benefits I just mentioned, that it’d be a good use of public funds. 

Between 2014 and 2024, the amount course fees could rise each year was between 2 and 2.8 percent. In 2025 and 2026, course fees were allowed to rise by 6 percent. If elected, what would your policy on course fees be?

We don't have a policy on this, so I can't set out a number for you. But I think looking at the level to which the government supports tertiary education to make it affordable for people is really critical. The main way we're tackling it is through the citizens' income to reduce the debt burden on students. 

Is reducing those course fee rises something you'd be open to investigating?

Yeah, definitely. I wasn’t aware of the changes which have been made. 

These course fee increases have come as final-year fees-free was removed; is this something Opportunity would return? 

The removal, we think, was done hastily and unfairly. To remove it when students have gone into studying under the expectation they would get a year free is incredibly unfair. We would prefer to see the citizen's income implemented rather than the fees free. If you're a student, getting 19,500 a year as a citizen's income is going to have a much bigger financial impact than one year of free course fees. It will drastically reduce student loan debt much more than that fees-free scheme would, and we think has much bigger, broad follow-on effects.

Wellington’s unemployment rate is at 6.3 percent, but for those aged between 15 and 24 it is 8.4 percent. There are ten thousand fewer jobs in Wellington than there were last election, and the government is looking to remove 8700 public sector jobs, which would disproportionately affect Wellington. Right now, what incentive is there for a graduate to stay in Wellington?

It sounds pretty grim, and I don’t blame those people for leaving. These are big economic problems which are not new, and yes, there have been a lot of increased job cuts under this government. But our economy has been stalling for a long time. We've had really low productivity growth—about 0.2 percent compared to the OECD average of 0.9 percent—year on year, meaning we work harder and get paid less. In those terms, we are a third poorer than Australia. So we need to change these big economic settings, and that’s where our policies around competition, innovation, investing in small business, and the tax reset come in to set our economy up for success in the long term. 

Obviously, a citizen's income would go a long way to supporting those people who find themselves out of work suddenly or unable to get a job, and with the growth of AI joblessness, it’s going to become even more of an issue. But the challenge is here and now, we need to do something about it, and we need to make sure we’re making good long-term decisions, rather than sticking plasters on things. 

I feel like I can't give you a satisfactory answer to say it's going to be all better in the next couple of years. We need the bravery to make some big, big changes to our economy.

Looking at the microscale of Wellington, how do you make people stay here?

I think if people saw the government was setting a really clear agenda around how it's going to grow the economy, by supporting our creative sectors, our tech sector, our entrepreneurs, and startups, then people might be more people willing to stick it out and try and start a business of their own or get involved in some of those initiatives. But without that direction, without the government saying that this is where we see the future of Wellington's economy, then I don't blame people for wanting to leave.

Doesn’t Opportunity also want to shrink the size of the public sector?

Not as a goal itself, but as an outcome of our tax reset. The complex welfare system I mentioned costs a lot of money for us to administer. Staff who are constantly having to check up on people, making sure they still meet the criteria. Those are the roles which we think would be lost potentially through this transition. But we would do so carefully, and not make people redundant overnight. We’re talking about losing 2000 jobs over 10 years rather than National’s announcement of 9000 jobs overnight. Because if we can reduce the public sector because we don’t need to check up on children in poverty, then I think that’s a good thing. 

Access to mental health addiction services for young people has declined—there are 5000 fewer people receiving care than five years ago. How would Opportunity address the gap between demand for mental health care and the services available? 

Mental health is just a crisis point for many age groups and population groups in New Zealand. We only really have enough funding to support people when they're at the very acute end of needing mental health support—which is a problem across all of healthcare. So we would like to see more of a share of GDP going to health. Currently it’s at 7.5 percent; we’d like to see it get to 9 percent, and for that funding to go into primary and community care, so there are mental health services for people who aren’t necessarily at crisis point but still need that support. 

Thank you so much for taking the time to chat to me, Q. 

Thanks, Dan.