The Taxpayers Union released yesterday the latest Curia poll for them. It showed Labour still able to form a Government with the Greens, but that the gap had closed from 20% in September to 7% in November.

The more salient trend is what has happened this year with the country direction – a question where you ask if things are heading in the right or wrong direction.

As you can see there has been a massive change this year. This predates the August 2021 lockdown.  I believe the earlier tightening was related to the lack of progress on issues such as house prices, and then in August Covid struck again. At first, we saw a rallying effect when there was a drop in those saying the wrong direction, but this reversed in October and accelerated in November.

Normally summer holidays are good for Governments as people have a relaxing time and tune out of politics. So normally I would expect to see the net direction improve early next year. However, this may be linked to whether people actually get to have a summer holiday, and are not locked down. So I would be very very surprised if the PM doesn’t move all of NZ to the traffic light system in early December, regardless of vaccination rates in Northland and Gisborne.

Kiwiblog is the personal blog of David Farrar. I set it up in July 2003 after several months of getting addicted to reading other blogs. Prior to blogging, I used to participate in Usenet Internet newsgroups,...