Baby steps steady, but next milestones crucial
Like new parents filling out a Plunket baby book, the politics-watchers have been busy measuring and recording new National leader Christopher Luxon’s ‘‘firsts’’. His first speech to media, following an uncontested caucus coronation after he reached a deal with former leader Simon Bridges: very good, robust. Ninetieth percentile for a leader in the first hour of life, surely. His first steps in Question Time: a stumble, to begin, but then an assured performance.
Luxon will have to grow up fast, as a first-term (and barely past first-year) MP who now carries the hopes and dreams of New Zealand’s second-largest political party on his shoulders. Nonetheless, he takes over the leadership in a position his immediate predecessors must envy, with a consensus appointment, an election two years away, and a Government starting to lose its Covid-fuelled mojo.
His next series of firsts will be crucial. First he will assemble his leader’s office. Todd Muller scrambled together an office, on a barely contested victory, which was inherited by Judith Collins until she could install her own loyalists after National’s dismal election campaign.
The role of political staff is usually overlooked by the public, and overestimated by political anoraks (and, speaking from experience, staffers themselves). While assembling a competent office is a sign of a strong politician, there is something of a chicken and egg quality about it. Almost invariably, strong politicians attract strong staff, and weak politicians attract weaker staff. Luxon is understood to be speaking to heavy hitters.
Then he has a long summer break to consider what Muller, somewhat ruefully and months after his resignation, called the ‘‘hard strategic work’’ of deciding your intentions for the leadership, and flesh out his vision for New Zealand ahead of an agenda-setting ‘‘state of the nation’’ speech to start the political year.
Like John Key before him, Luxon has arrived in the job with a clear focus on winning back the political centre which, since the beginning of Covid19, Jacinda Ardern bestrides like a political colossus. Unlike Key’s predecessor, Don Brash, Luxon succeeds Judith Collins, who was singularly unsuccessful in consolidating votes on the right under the National banner.
David Seymour’s leadership of ACT complicates the common wisdom of recent decades that ACT’s polling success is purely a function of National’s failure. He has name recognition, and personal popularity, both in terms of approval ratings and preferred prime minister rankings, that are unprecedented for a modern third party leader outside Winston Peters.
Even then, however, it’s no slight on Seymour’s extraordinary campaigning to acknowledge that a sizeable chunk of ACT’s roughly 16 per cent of polling is made up of disgruntled National supporters who are at least open to coming home. Some movement is inevitable.
But even without it, the ACT problem is not really a problem at all. With Seymour owning his territory, opposing hate speech laws and attacking Covid restrictions from a laissez-faire position, Luxon is free to pitch for the median voters who reliably handed elections to Helen Clark, John Key and Jacinda Ardern.
HLuxon is free to pitch for the median voters who reliably handed elections to Helen Clark, John Key and Jacinda Ardern.
e has started in Key-like fashion, promoting his ambition for the country to share, it is implied, the same kind of success he has been blessed with. It is an optimism that has not been readily apparent in National since Key departed. His public narrative, a successful businessman, is tidy but not compelling, and he will work on ways to fill in the details.
His next firsts will be leading delegations at Rā tana and Waitangi Day, if organisers decide to invite politicians (which may be Covid-dependent). As such, Luxon will have to think harder about his views on the Treaty and Mā ori, which have thus far been informed by an anonymous stint as spokesperson for the nebulous iwi business portfolio.
He has kept the form of Collins’ criticism of cogovernance, saying he supports partnership and opposes ‘‘separatism’’, but the substance remains a question mark. The shortcomings of government services run from Wellington for remote Mā ori, in particular the vaccination rollout, put in the spotlight by this week’s Waitangi Tribunal inquiry, show that any forward-looking National Party must be as eager to embrace devolution and sharing responsibility as Bill English was on his way to being.
Then it will be the first year of the rest of the National leader’s life. The Government is entering into its most politically vulnerable stage of the pandemic, having resigned itself to the inevitable spread of Delta.
Of course, a Plunket book is a record of a short, but special, moment in time. Like swimming certificates and attendance records, no-one wants to see it appended to a job application. By the 2023 election, no-one will remember the stumbles or the minor gaffes or successes of these early days of the Luxon era. What’s most important is that he uses this time to become the leader he hopes to be in 2023.