A new poll shows the coalition has slightly extended its lead over the left bloc thanks to a surge in support for New Zealand First, while both the major parties remain languishing in the 20s.<\/p>\n
The Taxpayers’ Union Curia poll has National and Labour neck and neck: since its September results, National dropped to 28.5 percent (down 0.5 percentage points), while Labour rose to 28.2 percent (up 2.3).<\/p>\n
On Thursday Labour accused National of painting beneficiaries as “bludgers” in the hope it translates to a bounce in the polls.<\/p>\n
National on Thursday vowed to introduce random drug testing for those receiving Jobseeker support, arguing they should take “reasonable steps to remain work-ready”.<\/p>\n
Follow the latest with RNZ’s live coverage above.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A new poll shows the coalition has slightly extended its lead over the left bloc thanks to a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":624952,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[111,43,139,69],"class_list":["post-624951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=624951"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624951\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/624952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=624951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=624951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=624951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}