Hundreds of people are joining Gareth Morgan's political party which he founded in November of last year.

The Opportunities Party is going through the registration process with already more than 2500 members signed up.

The Electoral Commission posted notice of the registration application on January 21.

'I'm told by the guys who work with other parties that 2500 members already is big,” says Gareth. 'They just go to the website and sign up and pay their twenty bucks”.

So far the party has released policy statements on immigration, tax and the environment.

Gareth has identified property as one of the biggest election issues this year.

'Property has driven a massive wedge between the haves and the haves not. If you look at some of the lower paid jobs, their wages haven't gone down but actually their discretionary income has gone down through the floor.”

The reason for the obsession about property is because 'it's the easiest way to make money,” he says.

'Wages is just a mugs game. You only earn yourself enough wages to get yourself on the property ladder and that's where you make your money.

'I know people who have never paid tax in their lives after that first job,” he claims. 'They earned enough money to get on the property ladder and ever since then they've basically done up houses. Lived in them. And then used them to go again, and go again, and again.

'And those of course are the people who are most stridently opposed to what I'm talking about. I have friends like this, I've said to them, ‘but you've made that on the back of other people. You've had a tax break but the other people haven't.'

'I really struggle with that.”

Gareth says there's quite a big elite in New Zealand now because there's been a 'property phenomenon which has been the easiest way to make money”.

New Zealand has also been through government after government, ever since Douglas, where people have made money from property and kept it, he adds.

'I had this conversation with Key years ago when he was in his second term and he said ‘yep it's the right thing to do isn't it?' and I said ‘totally'. And he said ‘unless you do the owner occupied house it will never work' and I said ‘no that's right you've got to do the owner occupied house it's the core of it'. ‘They'd never go for it,' said John Key.”

'And I said ‘so what? You just let the problem get worse and worse until you get a massively negative and extreme reaction to it. Because you're locking more and more people out of the property market'.”

Gareth talks about the demographic that's getting locked out - young families, millennials and anyone with strong student debt, plus those starting life over after relationship breakdown or other reasons.

He believes his message will resonate most with people who care beyond themselves.

'People right across the political spectrum actually. They walk up to me on the beach all the time and quite often you get a husband and wife, and the wife is for you but the husband isn't. So that should be interesting.”

His ambitions seem fairly modest. He's worked out half a dozen policies that would make a massive difference to this country for the positive. He plans to present them to the New Zealand public, thrash them in the media over the next 12 months and let everyone decide.

'If people want to say ‘nah go back to the beach and leave us alone', well that's fine. But at least my conscience is clear. You won't argue me down on them, they're pretty thoroughly researched and I've commissioned a lot of good people to do the work. So the arguments against them won't hold up.”

What will hold up, he believes, is not the prejudice so much but the desire to avoid and resist change. He reflects on how Brexit and Trump was change that came as a shock.

'Basically the liberal experiment, if you like, in the US and UK, has not delivered,” maintains Gareth.

'If you put that into the NZ context, it hasn't delivered trickle-down. The gaps are just getting wider in terms of the inequality. The promise 30 years on hasn't been fulfilled.

'Do we just keep it rolling?” he asks.

'John Key's modus operandi was a steady hand. The one thing he achieved that I would give him big ticks for is he pulled NZ back from going hard right with Brash and all those guys.

'But to me, where he lost it, is he allowed inequality to get bigger again. It's been the property thing that's done that and made housing and rent unaffordable. So it's just chewing more and more of those people's incomes so their actual discretionary income is going down quite strongly.”

Gareth believes the youngest baby boomers are now in their early 50s and in a position to do something about this.

People under that age group comprise 54 per cent of the voting public, but the percentage of that 54 per cent who vote is ridiculous, he adds. 'It's really low”.

'We've done some testing and sampling amongst those ones, to see what would bring them out to vote. Asked them what is the most important issue to them. It's pretty depressing when you get their response. Number one is marijuana.

'So you go, ‘ok that might be an issue but that's number one?' Talk about first world bloody problems.”

He believes the government has benefited those who already own property but not anyone else.

'If you're a tenant or a generation just going out to buy your first home which is eight times the average income instead of three, then you have problems.

'People my age do care,” he declares. 'I'm getting that. People do care. And people don't care. They are very polarized. I can see it on my Facebook.

'Some want to give back but others say they've scrimped and saved their whole lives,” contends Gareth.

'I've said ‘hang on you've paid $150,000 for that house and now it's worth $650k. The $500k is nothing to do with you'. They say ‘well it's not my fault and now it's mine'. I say ‘so what you're telling me is that you don't care, which is fine but it's actually what you are saying so don't disguise it as anything else'.” He pauses.

'That sets them on fire and away we go.”

He states that no one is advising him politically.

'I'm very much a lone wolf type of guy. I have a tight team of six around me, and that's it. Everything I've done my whole life, I've started with a blank sheet of paper and worked it up.

'I've done a lot of work on it. There's all the policies that I've been working on for years and I've written books on them so when people ask what are you going to say in this area I tell them to go read the bloody book on it, and it will tell you.”

He has now released policies on tax, immigration and the environment. And from provocative locations. Outside John Key's house, at Wellington Airport with the Gandalf backdrop, on a dairy farm with the environment policy. This week he went head-to-head with Winston at Ratana. Gareth's is view is that the environment and economic growth should be soul mates, compatible.

He's clearly annoyed that people ask if he's grandstanding with money, achieving nothing.

'People always say that with whatever they do, they say you've got money therefore you must be evil. And I say back to them ‘I'm totally self-made. Are you saying people shouldn't make money? What are you actually saying?' People have a tall poppy syndrome. That's what we had here with the council and the sculpture.

'You get a lot of people who are just resentful,” he says. 'And I say ‘rather than attacking the messenger have you anything to say on the issue?' And they reply ‘no'.”

He laughs.

Gareth likes people to be reasonably literate with economic issues before coming and asking questions.

'Economics does require that you think about the issue,” he says. 'That you do a bit of homework before you mouth off. But what we see is that everybody is an expert and unfortunately when you look at the things that a lot of people say you see that they don't know the difference between cash and income.

'You might say that I've spoken down to that person but I say it does require a certain amount of literacy. They've got no right to be lazy buggers and then ask questions.

'We can't be experts in every field,” he reiterates. 'There's a difference though between a lay person in a field who is enquiring or who has a legitimate point and is relatively civil about it, and somebody who just rants at you from some position of prejudice.”

Trump and Brexit.

He likens Trump to Bob Jones.

'Made a lot of money in the property thing and then in Trump's case dabbled across in the show biz thing with his Apprentice. And he came out of the block representing the working man.

'I think the fascinating thing with Trump is how come the mainstream media got it so wrong all the way up to the day of the election. I would be looking at that and say how could they read it so wrong.”

Gareth and his wife Joanne have travelled extensively through the southern states of the USA on their motorbikes. Gareth recalls Joanne saying the day Donald Trump announced he was going to seek the nomination of the Republicans that he'd win easily.

'I said ‘how can you say that, the guy's mad!'”

She reminded him of all the people they'd seen and talked with across the country who Trump was representing.

'The version of the American dream these days is not the house in the burbs with a car or a pickup,” says Gareth.

'It's a trailer home with a ride-on mower. There's twenty million of them who live in trailers, not on camps. On their own piece of land with beautifully mowed lawns. You look at those people and they're so alienated from the ones in Washington and California, it's like different planets. That's who he appealed to. It was all about ‘we're bringing jobs back, you've been ignored by the liberal Democrats'.”

It seems Trump somehow identified the average American's ‘point of pain'. Could Gareth do likewise for NZ?

'Property,” declares Gareth. 'Property has driven a massive wedge between the ‘haves' and the ‘have nots'. It's a huge wedge. If you look at the lower paid jobs, their wages haven't gone down.

'Actually once you take accommodation out their wages have gone down enormously. So their discretionary income's gone through the floor.”

It's interesting to Gareth that people are joining The Opportunities Party who have never previously belonged to a political party.

Gareth and the Greens

The 2017 Mount Albert by-election will be held in the Mount Albert electorate on 25 February 2017. The seat was vacated following the resignation of David Shearer, a former Leader of the New Zealand Labour Party. National decided not to put up a candidate, Jacinta Ardern is contesting the seat for Labour and Julie Anne Genter for the Greens.

'What the hell is going on there?” asks Gareth. 'Julie and Jacinta both running.” He's implying that the two parties are not working together, that it's a needless home goal.

'We can't trust Labour and the Greens to win the election because they have personal ambition and ego always trumping what's best for NZ.”

'I took the Greens on about that early in 2015 and said ‘you guys are now saying you're not going to work with the Nats. That's ridiculous! Are you an environmental party or not? You should be able to say that you'll work with anybody.' Russell Norman was still the boss.”

He considers that the Greens must have other agendas not just the environment.

'Otherwise they'd work with National,” he opines. 'The reality of the Greens is that it's two parties melded into one. It's a sort of far left economic party with Metiria Turei and then there's your more rational economically but also more heavily environmentally conscious side represented these days by James Shaw.

'So they're sort of uncomfortable bedfellows in a lot of ways. The Greens always say they're very democratic but what that actually means that unless they have a consensus of those two factions it will blow up in their face. So that's their leg iron. They've got that going on.

'And now they're trying to get with Labour. It's a god-almighty mess in my view. There's the idea put out by them that National is anti-environment so they say ‘we have to change the government'. And I say ‘no you don't! You have to get the government to do more of the policies that you support. It's not about the people.'

'They will never be anything but an enemy to the environment,” he continues, discussing the Greens. 'I don't think that's credible. They're pretty weird. Individually the people seem quite fine but as a group I don't understand them.”

'What the hell are Labour and the Greens wanting to have these by-elections for? And then I figure I wonder if they're doing it because they just don't get enough press. And if they keep doing it, they'll just p*** National off so much they'll call an early election. What are they up to?”

'We will work with whoever the party in power is,” says Gareth. 'We don't care who they are, it's the policies we want to see in place.”