Opportunity Party still open to working with National despite Christopher Luxon ruling it out

The Opportunity Party leader says their door is always open, despite National ruling out including them in a potential coalition.During Monday's post-cabinet media conference, National leader Christopher Luxon said he would not do business with any party that wanted to raise taxes.His office later confirmed he had ruled out working with Opportunity.The fledgling party is on the cusp of entering Parliament according to the latest RNZ-Reid Research poll, which put it at 4.7 percent - just shy of the 5 percent threshold.Opportunity's leader Qiulae Wong has consistently said it would work with any party, and she told RNZ that position had not changed following Luxon's comments."We are still here, ready and willing to have that conversation when he is," she said."I think there's a lot on our policy platform, what we stand for, that National would want to further, and I think we'd be a good constructive partner for them."That was still possible, she said."They might need us to form a government, in which case I guess their tune might change."Opportunity's flagship policies include establishing a universal basic income of up to $370 a week, and a 1.75 percent annual tax on the value of urban land and 0.5 percent on rural land.Wong said her party's policy would cut taxes for 70 percent of New Zealanders, raise them slightly for about 10 percent, and leave 20 percent about the same.She had not had any formal conversations with Labour or National about working together following the election, she said.Wong urged the major parties to move on from "tribal politics", saying New Zealanders had told her they were sick of it."The more that we try to put New Zealand voters into a box of either left versus right, means that we rule out the idea of people kind of working constructively together on some of our really big gnarly issues, like climate change, and AI, and how we're going to grow the economy."That old school way of doing politics really needs to end, we've got to do things differently."Labour's campaign chair Kieran McAnulty said the party would set out who it could work with "very shortly".ACT leader David Seymour said he was surprised to hear Luxon rule out working with Opportunity - because he thought he had already done so."I already thought it was obvious that parties of sensible economics can't work with people who want to put every New Zealand adult on welfare, then tax your property to pay for it."