Time for show of compassion
Christopher Luxon is now the third favourite Chris in Parliament, behind Labour’s Chris Hipkins and National’s Chris Bishop, with the latest Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll showing the Prime Minister’s net favourability a smidge behind the other Chrises.
A series of post-election polls have confirmed that the new PM is not enjoying the usual honeymoon boost that first-term prime ministers have come to expect.
It must be frustrating. After all, he is doing what he said he would do in the lead-up to the general election. He’s ticking off the actions he campaigned on and has his Cabinet ministers focused on delivering.
So why isn’t he gelling?
On an ill-fated travel day amid weather warnings, flight delays and cancellations, I randomly sampled some fellow stranded Kiwis.
My findings (I use the word in the loosest sense) were as follows: white men don’t understand why he’s polling so badly, young white women think his Government is coming across as too rightwing, older women seem apathetic about Luxon, like other aspects of the coalition, and Māori men and women think Luxon is too negative and focusing on the wrong issues.
At heart Luxon is apparently a compassionate conservative, but it seems he’s struggling with the compassion bit politically and publicly.
He needs a hook. Something more values-based and vision-focused to counter the check-box action plans and cringeworthy TikToks (that rack up hundreds of thousands of views).
He has to tell us more than just that our health system, economy, academic institutions, infrastructure and crime rates suck and he’ll get them all back on track.
Luxon needs to roll out the brokenwindow theory on a national scale, using respect, personal responsibility and conserving social structures as the value system he applies to tackling the rip in our social fabric that we all feel and see.
The theory goes that visible signs of crime and antisocial behaviour, such as broken windows and vandalism, breed environments that encourage further crime and disorder. It was popularised in the 1990s by New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and police commissioner William Bratton and saw the city’s police target small, petty crimes as a way of bringing down the overall crime rate.
In more recent years, the UK did the same thing with its prisons – associating environments rife with vandalism as ones underpinned by a general lack of respect which, in turn, was causing huge numbers of assaults on prison staff and making prisons truly vile institutions rather than ones focused on rehabilitation.
It feels like an approach that would suit Luxon, while also being complementary to the respective brands of his two coalition partners. It would help give Luxon his own brand – one that inspires people to feel something, and one that could help distinguish him as a leader, not just a capable manager.
When I worked on the Provincial Growth Fund, I was struck by what we saw in the eastern Bay of Plenty township of Minginui – a tiny forestry town that time, and successive governments, forgot.
When we first visited, there were boarded-up shops, smashed glass in the street and paint peeling off every single house. Following a $6 million investment into Minginui Nursery, entire families benefited from the creation of new jobs and a renewed sense of pride and purpose. Homes got a new lick of paint, fences were fixed and the streets were cleaned up.
Luxon, and National, need to start talking far more about social investment now; waiting another year or so will be too late. He should be telling us how the state can better care for our most vulnerable populations, and how dangling the right carrots can create the social mobility that conservatives say they strive for.
Luxon clearly places great emphasis on the family unit, and rightly so, seeing as it’s the one social structure that acts as the greatest determinant to people’s lives.
His next action plan should apply the broken-windows theory to the family unit and contain some targeted policies to help tackle the multi-generational challenges many New Zealand families face.
Luxon can be tough on crime while also addressing the drivers of crime. He can let both ACT leader David Seymour and NZ First leader Winston Peters focus on their respective political narratives, while he focuses on the more values-based side of his conservative beliefs.
The broken-windows theory could be the golden thread that weaves various coalition Government policies together and shows Kiwis that social progress hasn’t been forgotten and replaced with targets and headline-grabbing initiatives.
Restoring a sense of pride in our social and civic institutions is the type of mild conservatism that more people can get behind. Labour’s outgoing finance spokesperson, Grant Robertson, ended his valedictory speech last month by quoting American politician Harvey Milk’s famous speech about hope, telling the three parties in the coalition that politicians have to give people hope.
That’s what is missing from the Government at present, and Luxon would be wise to start leading from the heart rather than to keep managing from the hip-pocket.
Georgina Stylianou is a director of government relations firm BRG and has worked as a political staffer for National and NZ First. She is a former journalist.