Taxpayers' Union Curia Poll: April 2022
Exclusive to members and supporters, we can reveal the results of the eighth Taxpayers’ Union Curia Poll.
The polling period was 7 April - 13 April 2022.
Here are the headline results:
Party |
Support |
Change from last month |
National |
37.8% |
↑2.5 |
Labour |
36.8% |
↑0.6 |
Greens |
9.4% |
↓3.0 |
ACT |
8.4% |
↓2.8 |
Māori |
3.6% |
↑3.5 |
NZ First |
1.7% |
↓0.1 |
Other |
2.3% |
↓0.7 |
National takes the lead for the first time since the Taxpayers' Union Curia Polls began. However, much of National's gain appear to have come at ACT's expense. Labour holds steady with a slight bump, the Greens drop and the Māori Party rises.
Here is how these results would translate to seats in Parliament:
The shifts in party support result in National gaining three seats, ACT losing four, the Māori Party gaining four, the Greens losing four, and no change for the Labour Party. This means the gap between the Centre-Right and the Centre-Left blocs has shrunk from nine seats in January to just one seat in April. Both blocs would not receive enough seats to govern, thus, the Māori Party would be the 'kingmaker.'
(For the purposes of this chart, the Māori Party is not included in the two major blocs.)
Just like the TV polls, our pollsters do not read out options to participants to choose their preferred Prime Minister – we just include those who are named as preferred by more than a few people in the random sample of one thousand voters. Here are the updated preferred Prime Minister ratings, shown over time:
Preferred Prime Minister |
April 2022 |
Change from last month |
Jacinda Ardern |
36.3% |
↓1.5 |
Christopher Luxon |
28.6% |
↑2.0 |
David Seymour |
4.8% |
↑0.4 |
Winston Peters |
2.6% |
↓2.9 |
Luxon and Seymour are up. Ardern is slightly down, while support for Peters has dropped.
New Zealanders are now almost evenly split on whether the country is heading in the “right” or “wrong” direction. There are slightly more New Zealanders that believe the country is heading in the wrong direction.
New Zealanders were also asked to scale between 1 and 5 their favourability towards different politicians. “Very Favourable” (5) plus “Favourable” (4) are netted off against “Very Unfavourable (1) and “Unfavourable” (2) to come to a “Net Favourability” result. Those responses that are neither favourable nor unfavourable are disregarded.
Luxon has a more positive net favourability (+12%) than Ardern (+9%), but fewer people have an opinion on Luxon either way. Ardern’s net favourability continues to drop. Ardern's net favorability has fallen from +33% (October 2021) to +9%(April 2022).
For the full polling report, covering the detailed insights the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition are used to receiving, join our Taxpayer Caucus – our club of most generous financial supporters who make our work possible.
The scientific poll was conducted by Curia Market Research and commissioned by the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union. The full polling report is being released exclusively to members of our Taxpayer Caucus. As is well known, but for full disclosure, David Farrar is a member of the Board of the Taxpayers' Union and also a Director of Curia Market Research Ltd.
The Taxpayers’ Union Curia Poll was conducted from Wednesday 07 April to Wednesday 13 April 2022. The sample size was 1,000 eligible New Zealand voters who are contactable on a landline or mobile phone selected at random from 20,000 nationwide phone numbers. The results are weighted to reflect the overall voting adult population in terms of gender, age, and area. Based on this sample of 1,000 respondents, the maximum sampling error (for a result of 50%) is +/- 3.1%, at the 95% confidence level. This poll should be formally referred to as the “Taxpayers’ Union Curia Poll”.