Luxon’s soft soap
It was 5.30pm on a fine Monday in Hawke’s Bay when I strolled into a cavernous shed at the local showgrounds to hear National Party leader Christopher Luxon speak. Hey, it’s summer, what other entertainment could I expect to find?
He would have been pleased with the crowd. A party organiser told me there were about 450 people. There were a couple of youngsters at the front, probably in their twenties, but most attendees would have been the greying SuperGold-card-carrying traditional National supporters I’ve observed dozens of times before at party rallies since the days of Robert Muldoon.
Which will have pleased Luxon. Forget trying to attract younger voters for the moment; concentrate on regaining the core support lost in the debacle of the 2020 election. Back then, Tukituki – centred on Hastings – swung to Labour and Napier stayed with Labour’s Stuart
Nash, despite a strong showing by National’s Katie Nimon.
Dressed in an open-necked white shirt and somewhat dusty black suit pants, his jacket draped over a nearby chair, Luxon received a polite welcome from the crowd.
But his speech garnered just a couple of rounds of applause, although more came later during question time. The audience had come to check him out, watching intently and reserving their judgment.
As National’s “great unknown”, he spent the first chunk of his speech sketching out who he was: his background, his business career at Unilever and Air New Zealand, and his wife and family. The crowd listened.
He got on to the Government’s handling of the Covid crisis, saying he thought it managed 2020 well but performed badly in 2021, and the crowd was still listening. Towards the end, when he talked about the Government’s Three Waters programme – how people were being moved several bureaucratic stages back from controlling the water infrastructure they had paid for – his message began to resonate with his audience. And when he opened up to questions, and a member of the audience ventured the opinion that there was too much Māori language being used these days, the shed positively reverberated.
Historically, there are times at rural National Party meetings when you feel as if you may have been beamed into a Ku Klux Klan rally. But Luxon resisted the temptation to follow Don Brash’s almost-winning 2005 election strategy of attacking “racial separatism”.
He preferred to call the country “New Zealand”, he assured the questioner, or at times “Aotearoa New Zealand”. In TAB parlance, he had a bob each way.
Throughout, he seemed reasonable, sensible, affable and genuinely concerned about the issues raised, sounding more like a chief executive addressing a shareholder
He will need to inject a little more passion and hit key issues harder.
meeting than a rabble-rousing politician, which is understandable enough given his background. But he will need to inject a little more passion into his speeches and hit key issues harder.
He will also need to be a little less equivocal. A woman beside me asked him for his roadmap out of the Covid crisis. He waffled instead of pointing out there is no quick fix, no magic wand to eradicate the disease, but that the Government response could be more effective than just lockdowns and traffic lights.
It was a B-minus political performance in my book.
Still, he seems to be someone who can learn on the job and, frankly, he’s the best National has.
It will be fascinating to see how he develops over the next two years. ▮