MEDIA RELEASE
Not A Party (NAP)
7 October 2026
NOT A PARTY HAS A RADICAL PROPOSAL—LEAVE POLITICS BEHIND
New Zealand’s political problem may not be which party wins—but why we keep asking parties to govern us.
Not A Party believes it has the best idea in New Zealand politics precisely because it is not trying to be a winning political party.
Recent surveys have revealed a party political landscape in which support is increasingly polarised between parties on the left and parties on the right, while the traditional centre struggles to maintain a clear identity. The major parties appear increasingly dependent on positioning, polling and coalition arithmetic, while minor parties compete to capture the votes of the disenfranchised.
Not A Party proposes something considerably more radical.
Exit politics.
Not through apathy. Not through authoritarianism. Not by pretending that disagreement can disappear. Instead, Not A Party asks New Zealanders to consider whether we could design a completely different way of making collective decisions.
Political parties were designed for a particular kind of representative democracy. They organise people into competing groups, develop policies, seek votes, acquire power and then attempt to govern on behalf of everyone else. But what happens when the competing groups no longer represent the complexity of the people? What happens when citizens are forced to choose a package deal—agreeing with one party on housing, another on the environment, another on taxation, and none of them on the rest? What happens when the political system becomes better at producing political careers than producing good decisions?
Perhaps we don’t need better parties. Perhaps we need a better system.
Not A Party is therefore proposing a national conversation about governance beyond party politics.
That could mean experimenting with citizens’ assemblies, deliberative democracy, local decision-making, participatory budgeting, digitally enabled consultation, rotating civic representation, transparent public deliberation and new mechanisms for allowing expertise and lived experience to enter decision-making without requiring people to join or identify with a political tribe.
The point is not to arrive at another ideology and call it the answer. The point is to experiment.
A functioning society is not a reality television show in which two teams fight for the trophy while everyone else watches from the stands. It is a complicated living system constituted by millions of people with different knowledge, interests, skills and experiences.
Why should the machinery for governing that system be built around choosing a team every three years?
Not A Party does not claim to have found the final replacement for representative party politics. That is precisely the point. We don’t need another group of politicians arriving with a ready-made answer and asking the public to vote for it. We need citizens, researchers, technologists, artists, workers, communities, businesses and political thinkers to build and test alternatives together. New Zealand has an opportunity to become a laboratory for innovation in governance.
The political parties can keep arguing about who should run the country.
Not A Party wants to ask a more fundamental question.
What if we stopped trying to run the country through parties at all?
Not a new party.
A new question.
ENDS