Analysis by Keith Rankin.
Role: Economic historian.
Keith Rankin, 5 November 2026 – The most important policy of the Opportunity Party is its Universal Basic Income (UBI), which they call a Citizens Income (CI). Quite appropriately this is not a ‘bottom line’ policy. But it is a policy which Opportunity needs to push after the election; in particular they need to push for the public debate which they say they want. And not to be shut down the way Andrew Little’s Labour Party was ten years ago, when intimations of UBI surfaced.
UBI forms part of a counter-narrative – well-grounded in actual social science – which establishment narrators continue to push hard against.
In particular, Opportunity needs to push – for immediate consumption – the Basic Universal Income (BUI); a halfway-house tax and benefit reform which can stand on its own. Most importantly, the BUI is almost impossible to oppose – indeed is quite illogical to oppose it, once a person comprehends its simplicity and utility. A discussion on BUI can put-to-bed the ignorant partisan rhetoric used to push-back against public consideration of UBI. It then becomes possible to hold a constructive discussion about UBI, wealth tax, and economic citizenship.
(Refer to my Has the Opportunity Party missed some Opportunities to Talk Tax?, Scoop, 21 October 2026.)
The principal piece of pejorative rhetoric is the claim by National and Act candidates that the Opportunity Party’s CI policy is a proposal to ‘make everyone a beneficiary’. (See this RNZ 30 June 2026 article/podcast: Explainer: What is the Opportunity Party and what are its policies? The article sets up the policy incorrectly as “a universal basic income for everyone, funded by a new land tax”. In fact, CI is funded principally by a flattened income tax scale. In effect, the CI is a combo: a BUI funded by removing the bottom two tax brackets; and an extension to the BUI to be funded by a new land tax. A sensible public discussion needs to separate the CI – Opportunity’s UBI – into its two components.)
In a panel discussion about UBI in 2020 in which I participated – in Grey Lynn, organised by TOP (now Opportunity) – Don Brash, former leader of both National and Act – advocated a laissez-faire UBI to replace the highly targeted, inefficient and conditional welfare benefits that we have come to tolerate.
Note this from Sue Bradford “there have been members in times gone by who have promoted a minimalist position. Former ACT Leader Don Brash, for example, has in the past promoted a low UBI alongside an income tax of 30%, with no further top-ups, leaving most welfare claimants in a far worse position.” (Quote is taken from Progressive Basic Income in Aotearoa 2023, converge.org.nz.) A BUI we should note, while ‘minimalist’, leaves beneficiaries untouched; except that they get to keep their universal income when they move on into part-time employment.
My point here is that Don Brash – who has most recently been in the media for promoting an overhang strategy for National and Act – is (or was) a believer in an authentic economic liberal policy to do precisely what the present leaders of National and Act dismiss as a proposal to ‘make everyone a beneficiary’. Indeed, Brash has always been the authentic economic liberal; whereas Luxon and Seymour come across as grifters promising economic growth while pursuing and promoting fiscal and monetary policies which are known (to all economists, except the appeasers) to have the opposite (ie anti-growth) effect.
(Re Don Brash and the overhang, see RNZ’s Explainer: What is an overhang and how could it change NZ’s election result? 16 September 2026. And see National, ACT and NZ First at odds over vote-splitting campaign, TVNZ, 1 November 2026.)
Opportunity to talk
The biggest barrier to a decent public discussion in New Zealand is probably the corporate media rather than the politicians. Though the politicians’ minders are almost certainly to blame too.
I remember in 2015 when Andrew Little was Labour leader; he advocated some form of UBI as a part of his desire to launch a public discussion on the Future of Work, but was derailed by conservative interests. (Refer Labour leader Andrew Little promises debate on universal basic income, Stuff, 14 March 2016; Labour forced to clarify universal basic income ‘not party policy’, Patrick Smellie NBR, 23 March 2016; Delivering a future of work, Oliver Hartwich, NZ Initiative, 1 April 2016. The last mentioned item completes the hatchet job by not even mentioning a UBI while making new-tech productivity claims similar to those we are hearing today around AI.) The public discussion about the future of work died once the brief enlightenment around UBI was killed off by the grifters and the appeasing corporate media.
The Smellie article refers to the anti-intellectual “barking mad” comment made by John Key, another former National Party leader. May we infer that Key believes that Brash is ‘barking mad’? At least Don Brash is an authentic ‘intellectual’, a word few would apply to Key or Luxon. Andrew Little was weakly intellectual; he started something, but clammed up about UBI after receiving instructions – explicit or implicit – from somewhere.
AI and the Future of Work
Re the AI issue and the future of work – noting that AI-generated productivity can only maintain a degree of social cohesion and capitalist survival if accompanied by a UBI or at least a BUI – see this by Finn Hogan AI to bring short-term pain and a lot of job losses, says TOP, Stuff, 4 November 2026.
And this Australian piece (ABC) this month asks the question: With AI threatening jobs, is it time for a universal basic income? “A Universal Basic Income, or UBI, is a regular, obligation-free payment to everyone.”
Relating to the tech-bro community, see these: What Musk, Altman and Others Say About AI-Funded ‘Universal Basic Income’, Josie Reich, 14 August 2025; Forget Universal Basic Income: Elon Musk Envisions a Future Where Everyone Gets a High Income, Alex Barrientos, 30 October 2026; Elon Musk Giving Out SpaceX Shares As ‘Universal Basic Income’ Becomes A Major Proposal To Tackle AI, Alison Durkee, 19 October 2026. These promises of high productivity are of course just unfulfilled promises; they are the 2026 version of Oliver Hartwich’s comments in 2016, but with a more sophisticated realisation that capitalism itself will crash without a means in addition to wages of putting money in peoples pockets or digital wallets.
In the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes – economist and speculator – saved capitalism with his practical policy recommendations; policy insights informed by the conundrum about how machinery (as well as labour) becomes unemployed if there is no longer a mass-market for its outputs. (The late 1920s – just before the Great Depression – was another of those periods of intense political debate about machine-driven unemployment.)
In those days it was the new Social Credit movement which proposed a ‘national dividend’ to rechannel purchasing power into the pockets of those whose spending was most required; a policy that was both egalitarian and stimulatory. While Keynes did not oppose this Social Credit idea, his better remembered policy recommendation was to create working-class spending through increased government spending; effectively borrow-and-hire public policies. In New Zealand, Keynes’ prescription was followed – with great success, and with non-compliant monetary policy – to build state houses. (We in New Zealand could learn so much today by learning about the New Zealand economic history of 1925 to 1940.)
My BUI proposal is almost infinitely modest when placed beside the proposals of Elon Musk!
The argument for BUI is unrefutable; that’s why nobody ever tries to refute it
The conversation around a basic universal income only requires public engagement, in the same way that Universal Superannuation gained public engagement in 1938. The problem is the privileged political forces which suppress public engagement on the real issues.
(On this matter of contrived disengagement from the issues, the real issues concerning New Zealanders in the lead-up to Saturday’s general election are: the ‘balanced budget’ shibboleth, the contribution of unnecessarily-high interest rates to the high cost of living, the costly foreign wars which our government gives tacit support to, and the inequality-driven shortage of working- and middle-class spending in our communities. It is this kind of community spending that creates employment for young and non-young alike.)
The only credible argument against my BUI proposal is that it’s too modest. Too small to solve all! But that’s also its strength. What matters is that any nudge in the direction of sustainable democratic capitalism is a good nudge.
BUI is not the one ‘big-bang’ solution that some people are impatient for. It’s a solution which promotes liberalism, gradualism and a means to – over time, short or long time –put more spending power in the pockets of the people who most need it; and to do so without creating distortions (which require costly administration to alleviate), moral hazards, or giving big tax cuts to those who do not need them alongside small tax cuts to those who do need them.
On the basis of ‘negative income tax’ accounting – which is part and parcel of economic liberalism’s UBI, and which is essentially what Don Brash supported – a BUI is easily the most efficient kind of tax cut available to policymakers.
The BUI that I propose for immediate implementation is that outlined in my Has the Opportunity Party missed some Opportunities to Talk Tax?, Evening Report, 21 October 2026.
This is a basic universal income of $150 per week to all tax residents, funded by the removal of the 10.5% and 17.5% income tax brackets. For almost everybody, the only difference from now would be the fine-print on persons’ pay slips and MSD benefit contracts. For many people aged 18 to 24, however, it would make a significant difference to their quality and security of life; as it would for underemployed workers, and for recently unemployed people who have employed domestic partners. As important, as these security and mental health supports, is the benefit of knowing that one’s income can never fall to zero. Under my proposed BUI, every New Zealand tax resident would have an absolute minimum weekly disposal income of $150.
It would be a huge opportunity missed if the Opportunity Pary eschews the likely position of influence it will soon have; a position of influence which will enable it to promote the BUI – preceding a separate discussion on wealth taxes and CI – by requiring other-party politicians, the think tanks inside and outside of government, and the corporate media to engage with the Basic Universal Income policy concept.
BUI does indeed make us all beneficiaries; indeed public beneficiaries. We all should benefit from societal productiveness as well as our individual cleverness and hard work. We already are all beneficiaries – public beneficiaries – except for a few unfortunate people who fall through the cracks of bureaucracy. Unconditional benefits for all are built into the income tax scale that we take for granted; we are not brow-beaten by bureaucrats for paying lower tax on the first $50,000 of our annual incomes. That tax discount is an unconditional public benefit received by all but New Zealand’s very poorest individuals.
By linguistic definition, it is good to be a beneficiary; a benefit is ‘something good’. Just ask the shareholders of any company, such as Air New Zealand of which Christopher Luxon must have owned company shares, whether company dividends are something good.
This month’s politics
Opportunity may get more votes than New Zealand First this Saturday. If Mr Luxon can form a government with Opportunity and without New Zealand First, I reckon that he will be on the telephone to Qiulae Wong first thing on Sunday morning. Could she and Simeon Brown – the likely Minister of Finance under a National/Opportunity/Act governing arrangement – do political business together? I have never heard Brown use the ‘making everybody a beneficiary’ line of rhetoric; a line intended by Luxon to be pejorative, but avoided by politicians with better judgement. The young fogie and the slightly older Cinderella could become Aotearoa’s contribution to the youth wave in global politics.
About the writer:
Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.