Taxpayers’ Union Curia Poll December 2021

I’ve just presented the full poll results of the December 2021 Taxpayers’ Union Curia poll to the NZTU AGM. The full results are confidential to NZTU and Curia corporate clients, but the NZTU has made some of the key graphs available here.

This is the first poll to be done entirely after Christopher Luxon was elected Leader of the National Party, and it shows National finally having broken through the 30% barrier. In fact National is up 7% to 33%. The overall gap between the centre-left and centre-right is basically unchanged at 6%, so the centre-right needs to pick up another 4% or so to be in a position to form a Government. The key difference to last month, is that people now want to hear from National, and both National and Labour are in the 30s.

Also very noteworthy is Luxon’s ratings. He enters the Preferred PM ratings at 20% (Ardern 39%). That 20% rating is the highest outside an election period for any opposition leader (excluding Ardern’s six weeks) since John Key.

More importantly Luxon has a positive net favourability rating of +15%. This is in fact slightly higher than Ardern who is at +14% (in October it was +33%).

So overall a very reassuring poll for National. The change of leader doesn’t mean they are ahead in the race to form the next Government, but it does mean they are now competitive and they have a leader who has high favourability, which means people will want to listen to him and consider giving their vote to the party he leads.