After bursting into life ahead of the 2017 election, The Opportunities Party is now onto its fourth leader in five years. The party's new frontman speaks to Sam Sachdeva about the path into Parliament, breaking up the political status quo, and forging a new social contract for New Zealand.
Raf Manji is not short on ideas.
That much is clear after an hour-long interview with the new leader of The Opportunities Party (TOP for short) which sprawls from macroeconomic policy to the value of citizenship, with plenty of book and streaming recommendations in between.
That reading and viewing time is a luxury Manji may not have always had, given his stint on the Christchurch City Council from 2013 to 2019, then his work chairing an advisory group set up to distribute $12 million in funds raised for the victims of the city’s terror attack.
After a year spent undergoing counselling and rebalancing his life, Manji has now thrown himself back into the fray out of a desire to offer a fresh voice to voters disillusioned with the status quo on offer from Labour and National.
Manji sees TOP’s role in part as playing the provocateur, throwing out bold ideas which could change the conversation and seep into the mainstream.
He expresses particular frustration with Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, earlier in the day, categorically knocking back any suggestion that the Government would consider rent controls to tame the rental market.
“She said, ‘We are not considering it, we are not planning it, we are not going to do it, we're not talking about it’.
“She's so scared because everyone else is piling on and criticising, when actually in global macro land, there is a massive debate going on about price controls.”
While mainstream economic theory views rent controls as a bad idea, “and they generally are”, that may not be the case in emergency situations.
He points to Germany, which has applied “rent brakes” limiting increases to a set percentage to restrain the market temporarily while other, more lasting measures are put in place.
“To basically say, we're not going to talk about it and we're not going to do it, it's constantly ruling things out.”
Dragged into the dramas of party politics?
This is not Manji’s first tilt at central government politics: that came in 2017, when he ran as an independent in National MP Gerry Brownlee’s Ilam electorate on a platform of bringing the Commonwealth Games to Christchurch and establishing a $1 billion fund for the city’s rebuild.
He failed to dislodge Brownlee, but did cut his margin of victory by a third from 2014, while he claims credit for pressuring the major parties into committing more money to Christchurch for its new stadium.
When Newsroom spoke to Manji in 2017, he said he could have arguably stood for any political party but opted for an independent candidacy “to tell that story without getting dragged into all the dramas that you get with party politics”.
So why is he happy to jump headlong into the drama now, and why with TOP?
“There’s no drama in a party like TOP… the biggest arguments are going to be about policy,” he insists, a claim which, while somewhat dubious, has more credibility now than in the days of Gareth Morgan’s leadership role (he is no longer involved).
Manji is “not really a joiner” – Arsenal fandom aside – and says it is ideas rather than ideologies that have driven him.
He was on the receiving end of that tribalism during his time in Christchurch, with the Labour-aligned People’s Choice movement viewing him as “some terrible person because I raised some issues which didn’t fit into their view of the world”.
“Rather than kind of talking about it, it was just, ‘He's a bad guy,’ and I thought, well, I can't live in that dynamic.”
But opting for a role outside of the political establishment carries with it the added obstacles of breaking into Parliament – something no party has managed under MMP without first splintering from an existing caucus inside the House.
“If we’re still at one and a half percent by the end of the year, then we’ve got a big problem.”
Manji includes himself among the pool of potential TOP voters who instead plumped for the Greens in 2020, mainly because he believed the party had no chance of making it across the 5 percent threshold.
“It’s this wretched threshold: it’s distortionary, it's kind of anti-democratic. I can understand that, you know, we want to keep out ‘the crazies’, let's say … but that's also anti-democratic, because actually, those people are still part of society.”
He would be happy with a 0.8 percent (or one-seat) threshold, but could live with a 3 percent barrier if there were concerns about democratic stability.
But with any reforms from the Government’s electoral law review not entering into force until 2026 at the earliest, TOP will have to fight the next election on terrain tilted against it.
To achieve that, Manji has some ambitious goals: for one, doubling the party’s current polling to 3 percent by the middle of the year and rising again to 4 percent by the end of 2022.
“If we’re still at one and a half percent by the end of the year, then we’ve got a big problem.”
He is keen to build up party coordinators and volunteers throughout the country’s five main centres, bringing back previous members whose enthusiasm may have waned while winning over new supporters.
While TOP performs relatively well in Christchurch and Dunedin, and best of all in Wellington, Auckland is “the big nut to crack”.
The party underperformed its nationwide party vote of 1.5 percent in the region at the last election, notching up just 1.3 percent in the Auckland seats.
In addition to the young professionals there who should represent easy pickings for TOP, Manji highlights the large ethnic communities who don’t feel properly represented in politics.
“I mean, just picking an Indian or Chinese [candidate] or whatever into Parliament, that’s not – they've actually got to engage with people.”
Of course, there is an alternative to crossing the 5 percent mark; Manji confirms he’s thinking about running again in Ilam, where he has pre-existing networks of support and the public profile which could prove vital in a tight race.
He doubts Brownlee will attempt to regain his seat, while Labour incumbent Sarah Pallett could be vulnerable if the red wave which fuelled her shock victory in 2020 recedes.
Special mention is also made of TOP candidate Jessica Hammond, whose third-place finish in Ōhāriu at the 2014 and 2017 elections is as good as the party has managed in an electorate.
'Smartest guys in the room'
Manji blames the party’s past failures on the elections being overtaken by events, with Ardern’s ascent in 2017 and the Covid pandemic in 2020 undercutting parties’ ability to get into “the nitty gritty” of policy debates.
But he has also received feedback from friends about TOP’s “smartest guys in the room” tone turning off potential supporters, and says the sense that the party has the right answers to the issues of the day can’t trump the need for personal engagement.
Some have also questioned the party’s environmental bona fides, which Manji attributes to an issue of packaging rather than policy given its stance on biodiversity and climate change.
He is not a fan of the emissions trading scheme, instead preferring a straightforward carbon tax, and has previously argued New Zealand should lead the push for a global fossil-fuels reduction treaty.
But one of his overarching policy plans, one which has been gaining in popularity around the world, is the establishment of a “new social contract” between the state and its citizens.
The concept of a social contract usually holds that individuals give up some of their rights and freedoms in return for government protection in other areas – but Manji says politicians haven’t been holding up their end of the deal as a wealth gap continues to grow.
“The social contract has got to the point where people are going, ‘We're working poor: we're both working, we haven't got enough money, housing is too expensive, the cost of living is too expensive.”
“If we're going to cope with the next 30 years, we've got to do these things...incrementalism and sustained moderation is not going to work – there's a time for that and now is not that time.”
He believes one of the ways to close that divide is through attaching greater value to citizenship, with a national civic service scheme for both native-born Kiwis and migrants to build a stronger sense of connection to the country’s values and avoid the sort of schisms seen in post-Brexit Britain, Donald Trump’s America and the yellow vest protests in France.
But TOP has never lacked for grand ideas: Manji is firmly on board with the party’s pre-existing universal basic income policy, which he describes as the most important structural change a government could make.
The big question is whether he can succeed where his predecessors have failed.
Manji’s previous time in elected office may help, while he also senses that the tides of history may be turning towards a party with a grand vision.
“We are at the end of the cycle. We’re like we were in 1984: a lot of social tensions, a financial system which is in need of restructuring, and the debates overseas in the US, Europe, UK, about how to respond to the pandemic, how to deal with QE [quantitative easing] and QT [quantitative tightening]…
“It’s an exciting time, and I think certainly for younger people, trying to get them excited about the chance to reset the direction, and if we're going to cope with the next 30 years, we've got to do these things.
“We’ve got to sort out housing, and incrementalism and sustained moderation is not going to work – there's a time for that and now is not that time.”
