Luxon unleashes the corporate drone strike
Christopher Luxon led from the front yesterday when he announced some public service job cuts of his own, stripping around 6.5% of his 30-person-strong executive team of some portfolio responsibilities, along with one formal demotion outside Cabinet.
If Luxon’s mentor, former prime minister John Key, was the so-called “smiling assassin”, the current National party leader might be more like a corporate drone strike: affectless, unperturbed, and delivering the bad news in clinical HR speak.
“As issues change in prominence,” he told the press gallery about the decision to transfer tricky portfolios from firsttime ministers Melissa Lee and Penny Simmonds to their more experienced colleagues, and replace Lee in Cabinet with Climate Minister Simon Watts, it was important to have the “right people being on the right assignment at the right time”.
So, mostly a scheduling issue. Luxon addressed the reshuffle as more about the efficient allocation of resources to problem areas than about blame or punishment.
It is hardly unknown for a prime minister to fire a minister for mere underperformance, in the absence of scandal. It sends a signal about the standards expected by the leader.
Then-freshly-minted prime minister Chris Hipkins stamped his mark on the leadership and made reassuring noises about the kind of government he intended to lead when, early on, he sacked minister Stuart Nash for a historical breach of the Cabinet manual.
The problem becomes, as Hipkins discovered when he had to despatch Michael Wood and Kiri Allan soon after, that setting standards for your Cabinet means setting a corresponding standard for yourself as leader. Your air of authority comes to depend very much on whether your team can meet the standards you have set. As ministers streamed out of the door with increasingly bizarre indiscretions, Hipkins looked less like he was ruling with an iron fist and more like he was balancing precariously atop a kingdom of rot.
Timing also matters. To paraphrase The Thick of It’s Malcolm Tucker, it has usually been thought that if the PM sacks you after a year, you’ve effed up; if he sacks you after a week, he’s effed up by appointing you.
Luxon is turbo-charging the process - National grandees expressed sympathy for the ministers privately. But that show of strength will be a fillip for Luxon after a week where he was publicly rebuked by his deputy-PM-in-waiting David Seymour for criticising the ACT leader’s own combative statements about the Waitangi Tribunal.
This is another danger for Luxon.
He can pick and unpick his National ministerial cohort at will, but his partners’ ministers are still off-limits. Setting wildly divergent expectations can look like hypocrisy (although it can also look like a sellable difference between allied parties jockeying for crossover votes in 2026).
Luxon is canny enough to know that he will get the benefits of looking tough while also suggesting that he is taking a more subtle approach into the future, a sophisticated game of ministerial tetris, rearranging the bundle of portfolios within his Cabinet to optimal advantage.
Moving the disabilities portfolio to Louise Upston makes the most intuitive sense under this model and could probably have been executed without any obvious culpability for Simmonds: the still new Disabilities Ministry sits physically and to some extent organisationally within the Ministry of Social Development.
However, insiders say Simmonds has struggled with the workload across her portfolios, and that the disabilities carer payment changes were not the only significant official-led announcements that passed under her risk radar.
Lee’s demotion seems more unfair. She was thrust into the centre of attention with the closure of Newshub and layoffs at TVNZ. She failed to thrive.
But she had been, to differing extents, gagged by her own side. Even before the election, National refused to release her broadcasting policy to media organisations so as not to distract from the party’s “small target” campaign based on economic messaging.
In the middle of the TV news storm, Lee was stuck in a limbo of neither confirming-nor-denying that her Cabinet paper outlining support for the broadcasting sector had been held up by NZ First, or that it existed at all. Her office was reportedly barred from clarifying the timeline of policy development with journalists by Luxon’s office, to ease tensions with deputy PM Winston Peters.
Luxon described the minister now outof-Cabinet as being “disappointed” by her demotion.
Disappointment is natural. But if Luxon is true to his word and his track record on people management, then Lee and Simmonds should not necessarily lose heart. Luxon has been very serious about using the resources at his disposal to maximum effect.
A case in point is the renaissance of his predecessor, Judith Collins. Luxon defied expectations by bringing Collins quickly into the fold, after her tumultuous leadership, allowing her scope to develop not just policies but whole portfolios (including digitising government).
Her exceptional competence earned successive promotions from Luxon and in government she has again established herself as an indispensable front bench minister with a broad suite of crucial portfolios. A suite of portfolios that, if the PM is to be believed, may be added to as her junior colleagues find themselves in media trouble.