Christopher Luxon: Prime Minister attributes drop in polls to the "challenging times" kiwis are facing

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon is attributing last night’s poor poll result which showed coalition parties losing support to the “challenging time” Kiwis are facing. 

National, Act and NZ First have collectively dropped five percentage points according to the 1News Verian poll. Based on the poll, the left bloc would be able to form a government and NZ First would be out of Parliament. 

The poll had National at 36 per cent, down two points from the last poll in February. Labour jumped to 30 per cent, up two, and the Green Party also increased by two to 14 per cent. Te Pāti Māori was on 4 per cent, the same as the last poll. 

“We’ve got high inflation and high interest rates, they’re sick of it,” he told Newstalk ZB’s Mike Hosking this morning. 

“We’re making some pretty tough decisions and we need to do that in order to fix the mess that we’ve been left.” 

New Zealanders would make a call in 2.5 years’ time, he said. 

Everyone in the coalition Government was “very very focused” on fixing the “mess” they had inherited. 

And he laughed off some reporting of the poll results, calling it “a little frothy & sensationalist”. 

“I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about polls… 

“They can say what they want to, the bottom line is we know we’re here to do a job.” 

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