National's Christopher Luxon has continued a steady recovery as preferred prime minister over Labour's Chris Hipkins. Photo: RNZ
Labour has regained support lost the previous month in the latest Taxpayers Union Curia poll, with smaller gains for National.
Those positions are reversed on the preferred prime minister stakes, with National's Christopher Luxon's recovery outpacing that of Labour's Chris Hipkins, while New Zealand First's Winston Peters has taken a tumble.
The major parties' gains also came the expense of the others, with the exception of New Zealand First which held steady.
Despite a four-seat improvement for Labour on the last survey in April bringing it just one seat shy of National, the coalition would, on these numbers, retain a majority with 63 seats to the opposition parties' 58.
The key right-track-wrong-track metric will be disappointing for the governing parties, however, with New Zealanders' pessimism about the government's direction leading to a 10-point drop.
Party vote:
- National: 34.6 percent, up 1.1 percentage points (42 seats)
- Labour: 33.2 percent, up 3.4 (41 seats)
- ACT: 9.5 percent, down 0.5 (12 seats)
- Greens: 9.1 percent, down 1.9 (11 seats)
- NZ First: 7.4 percent, steady (9 seats)
- Te Pāti Māori: 3.9 percent, down 0.4 (6 seats)
For the minor parties, TOP was on 0.5 percent (down 1 point), Outdoors and Freedom was on 0.4 (down 0.6), and Vision NZ was on 0.4 percent (up 0.4), while 5.5 percent of respondents were undecided and 1.5 percent refused the vote question.
Labour's 3.4-point gain in this survey recovered some of the 4.3 points it lost in the previous survey, but it is still down from its Parliamentary-term high of 34.1 percent reached in March.
National continues to recover after hitting a low of 29.6 percent in January.
Luxon, the prime minister, has continued a steady recovery as preferred prime minister after a low point reached in March, the first and only month his rating fell below that of opposition leader Hipkins.
Peters' nearly five-point drop more than reverses the gains he made in the previous survey.
Preferred prime minister:
- Christopher Luxon: 24.5 percent, up 2.6 percentage points
- Chris Hipkins: 20 percent, up 1.1
- Winston Peters: 8.1 percent, down 4.7
- David Seymour: 6.7 percent, down 1.3
- Chlöe Swarbrick: 5 percent, up 0.8
The right-track-wrong-track result shows 46.0 percent of surveyed New Zealanders felt the country was headed in the wrong direction, compared to a third (33.3 percent) who felt the opposite.
It's a 10.3 percentage point drop, taking the net result back down to negative 12.7 percent.
While the April survey came within reach of a positive score, 2025 has continued in negative territory for the year following a streak of positivity that lasted from May to December 2024.
The poll surveyed 1000 eligible voters and was weighted for demographics, with a margin of error of 3.1 percent at the 95 percent confidence interval. It was conducted between 30 April and 2 May.
Curia is a long-running and established pollster in New Zealand. It has resigned its membership from the Research Association New Zealand (RANZ) industry body.
Polls compare to the most recent poll by the same polling company, as different polls can use different methologies. They are intended to track trends in voting preferences, showing a snapshot in time, rather than be a completely accurate predictor of the final election result.
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