THE MAN WHO WOULD BE PM
National MPs Todd Muller and Nikki Kaye are understood to be leading the ticket challenging Simon Bridges for the National Party leadership. But plenty of voters don’t know who Muller is. Henry Cooke and Thomas Coughlan report.
Todd Muller is ambitious. That much is obvious.
While most Kiwis have never heard of him, the 51-year-old second-term National MP is exceedingly well known around Parliament. Ask anyone to name a future National leader (a question that’s illuminated many a whiskey-drenched conversation between MPs in the past three years), and Muller’s name inevitably lands somewhere near the top.
He’s been near the top of this list for longer than most people realise. A former staffer in the office of prime minister Jim Bolger, Muller was always slated for big things — his colleagues speculated then that he may have taken the well-trodden route from staffer to MP.
Bolger himself remains a big fan of Muller. ‘‘He’s always been capable. Otherwise I wouldn’t have hired him for the prime minister’s office,’’ Bolger tells
Stuff.
To the surprise of many, Muller chose to go into the private sector after working for Bolger, instead of straight into politics.
He swiftly worked his way up the ranks at Zespri, before stints at the University of Waikato and as a director of Plant and Food Research. Before coming to Parliament in 2014, Muller worked at high levels within Fonterra, before quitting to make a run in Bay of Plenty – a safe National seat – in 2014.
That decision to finally have a go at politics would not have been easy. As group director of co-operative affairs at Fonterra, Muller would have been on a solid wicket, and had to move to Bay of Plenty from Auckland to make the run. MPs are well-paid in New Zealand, but Muller’s position at Fonterra meant he took a substantial pay cut to get into politics. You don’t make a move like that unless you think you’re destined for the big time.
Indeed, Muller had turned down the opportunity to have a punt at another seat way back in 2008 – Tauranga, the seat Simon Bridges eventually won.
But once he arrived in Parliament, the ambition was hard to hide. In his maiden speech, he noted it was the ‘‘realisation of a childhood dream’’ to represent his childhood home, the Bay of Plenty, in Parliament.
‘‘He’s been quite clear about his ambitions. He’s been upfront,’’ a National MP firmly on the side of Bridges told Stuff.
It wasn’t until National entered Opposition after the 2017 election that Muller’s public profile really grew. Bridges began his leadership promising new thinking on the environment and climate change.
He gave Muller the task of liaising with the Government on its Zero Carbon Bill — an overarching piece of emissionsreduction legislation that Climate Change Minister James Shaw desperately wanted the National Party to support.
These negotiations took a long time – although NZ First are as much to blame for that as National is – but ended up with National supporting the bill, with some caveats. This was a big win for Shaw, but also for a lot of people in the National Party who felt that the party needed to look responsive on the issue, which was becoming increasingly important to voters. It earned Muller a lot of respect from across the House.
Holding the climate change portfolio is not easy within the National Party. At a standingroom-only meeting at the National Party conference in 2019, Muller faced a hostile question that queried the existence of man-made climate change. His response was a lesson in political communication — he made absolutely clear for the journalists in the room that he disagreed on a factual level with the question, but emotionally understood and shared the sense of aggrievement the rural sector was feeling.
His old boss Bolger was very pleased with Muller’s work here, and said it showed a commitment to ‘‘what works’’, compared with ideology.
‘‘He’s a bit like me. What works is important. I think the world has seen enough of ideologues who believe if you repeat and chant the same slogans everything will work,’’ Bolger says.
But Muller resists easy characterisation as a leftie within National. He voted against the decriminalisation of abortion and is proud of his rural roots.
After Nathan Guy’s announcement that he would stand down from Parliament at the 2020 election, Muller gained the agriculture portfolio, a big get in a party that likes to think of itself as proudly rural.
The swiftness with which Muller shed the climate change portfolio after negotiations on the zero carbon legislation wrapped up appeared to confirm that he was as ambitious for himself as he was for the planet. Holding the climate change portfolio didn’t rule Muller out of contention for the leadership, but it wasn’t going to propel him to the front like agriculture.
Muller adjusted his style to suit the agriculture portfolio, becoming much more of an Opposition MP than he had been earlier — most memorably when he picked a fight with a Te Papa exhibit on water quality.
His slow but methodical ascension, potentially to the ninth floor, is often used as a