There is a playbook for minor parties under MMP that nobody wrote down, but everyone follows. Get enough votes to cross the threshold. Negotiate with the major parties. Trade your support for ministerial portfolios. Take your seat around the cabinet table and hope your larger partner does not drag you down with them at the next election.
This has been the standard path for three decades. It worked for New Zealand First in 1996, 2005, and 2017. It worked for ACT. It worked — after a fashion — for the Greens. Every minor party that has entered Parliament has chased the same prize: coalition. The idea that a party might deliberately choose a different path sounds almost naive.
But what if the prize is the wrong one?
Under our electoral system, parties that hold the balance of power have a third option beyond coalition and opposition: the cross benches. These are the seats in the debating chamber that sit at right angles to the Government and Opposition benches — the neutral ground, physically and politically.
A party on the cross benches can agree to support the government on confidence votes, providing the stability needed to govern, without signing a coalition agreement or accepting ministerial positions.
The difference is not theatrical. A coalition partner signs up for collective cabinet responsibility — the rule that once cabinet makes a decision, every minister must publicly support it, whatever their private view. RNZ’s explainer on post-election options describes this as the key dividing line: coalition partners are bound to the government’s decisions; confidence-only partners keep their independence.
A party on the cross benches makes no such commitment. It can vote for the government’s education bill on Tuesday and against its environmental bill on Wednesday — and neither vote is a crisis. Neither threatens the government’s survival. Neither requires an apology to anyone.
The traditional coalition model demands compromise, and compromise for a small party usually means trading away distinctive policies for concessions the major partner will try to water down later. You get the baubles of office — a ministerial warrant, a crown car, a seat at the big table — but your policy wins survive only as long as your larger partner finds them convenient. When the next election comes around, voters judge you by your partner’s record as much as your own.
That is how New Zealand First went from nine per cent of the vote in 2014 to losing all its seats in 2020. It is how the Greens have spent years defending compromises their activist base never signed up for. It is how ACT in 2023 campaigned on radical reform and then spent a term calibrating expectations about what their coalition agreement actually allowed them to do.
Sitting on the cross benches inverts the power relationship. The government needs your confidence vote to stay in office. It needs your support to pass its legislative programme. But it cannot take that support for granted, because you have not signed away your right to say no. Every bill becomes a negotiation. Every vote carries weight.
New Zealand has seen confidence-and-supply arrangements before — the Greens supported the Clark government on that basis from 1999 to 2002, without ministerial portfolios. But that was a party taking what it could get, not what it chose. The distinction is everything.
There is an international precedent worth noting. After Ireland’s 2016 general election produced a hung parliament, Fianna Fáil signed a confidence-and-supply arrangement with a Fine Gael-led minority government.
They did not take ministerial portfolios. They did not sign a coalition agreement. Instead, they guaranteed the government’s survival on confidence votes and budgets while reserving the right to oppose or amend every other piece of legislation on its merits.
The arrangement lasted the full four-year term and gave Fianna Fáil more influence over policy than most junior coalition partners achieve — without once entering cabinet. Fianna Fáil had the numbers to demand ministerial portfolios. They chose not to. That deliberate rejection of cabinet for leverage over legislation is something New Zealand has never seen.
New Zealand’s political culture leans consensus-oriented, so a cross-bench party’s credibility is the price of entry. Voters will tolerate independence — but not chaos.
This is not obstructionism dressed up as principle. It is the opposite: a commitment to judge each piece of legislation on its merits rather than on which party proposed it. Good policy from National gets a yes. Good policy from Labour gets a yes. Bad policy from either gets a no, with an explanation on the public record.
In a Parliament where neither governing bloc can command a majority alone, a cross-bench party positioned between them becomes not a nuisance but a gatekeeper. Not a junior partner hoping to be remembered in the reshuffle, but a genuine check on the government’s legislative agenda — one that can extract concessions without ever joining the executive.
New Zealanders are not naive about how Parliament works. They have watched thirty years of coalition deal-making, and they know the gap between campaign rhetoric and governing reality is wide.
A party that promises to be honest about what it can do — and visible about how it votes — offers something genuinely scarce: political transparency. A cross-bench model forces that transparency. Every vote is public, every concession is visible, every negotiation leaves a trace.
But transparency only works when voters understand the principles behind each decision, which means a cross-bench party must explain its votes clearly and consistently. Just a public voting record and the freedom to explain it, with no cabinet solidarity forcing you to defend decisions you privately oppose. No secret side deals. No coalition partner telling you what to smile through.
That proposition will not appeal to every voter. But it will appeal to the growing number who are tired of voting for a party only to watch it get absorbed into a larger bloc and become indistinguishable from it inside of eighteen months.
None of this is without dangers. A cross-bench party gets invited to fewer press gallery briefings, gets fewer televised moments, and risks being dismissed by the media cycle as indecisive — a party that cannot pick a side is a party that cannot pick a headline.
There is also the blame trap: when a government struggles to pass legislation, it is easier to point at the party refusing to fall in line than to admit the legislation was flawed. Voters who want clean narratives may punish what they perceive as obstruction rather than principled independence.
Then there is the more subtle risk: irrelevance through exhaustion. Policy-by-policy negotiation is gruelling work compared to the pre-packaged certainty of a coalition deal. A small party with limited research resources can burn through its people in a single term if it is fighting every bill on its merits. That is why the model demands not just ideological commitment but operational depth.
The next Parliament will almost certainly be one where no single bloc commands a majority. New Zealand’s Parliament was designed under MMP to produce exactly that outcome — a chamber where negotiation is not optional and where a party that refuses to be bought becomes the most interesting player in the room.
If a party did choose the cross benches over the cabinet table, it would look nothing like the coalition agreements we are used to. There would be no single document signed on day one and dusted off three years later. Instead, every sitting week becomes a negotiation — the Budget, the education amendment bill, the housing reform.
Each piece of legislation is a fresh conversation, with votes traded for concessions in full public view. A voting record builds over time, item by item, and voters can trace every decision back to the party’s stated principles — or hold it to account if they cannot.
Thirty years of MMP have taught us that minor parties which enter coalition tend to get dragged down by their larger partner at the next election. The cross-bench model does not guarantee survival either.
But it offers something coalition politics never has: the chance to be judged on what you actually did, not on what your larger partner did while you were in the room.
Ministerial warrants come and go. A voting record built on principle is harder to dismiss.
Steve Baron is a New Zealand-based political commentator and author. He holds a BA with a double major in Economics and Political Science from the University of Waikato and an Honours Degree in Political Science from Victoria University of Wellington. A former businessman in the advertising industry, he founded the political lobby group Better Democracy NZ. https://stevebaron.co.nz