Christopher Luxon's business acumen
How the Prime Minister's beliefs shape his approach to 'managing' Aotearoa New Zealand
It’s April, and the relatively new Prime Minister of New Zealand is on his first overseas mission to South East Asia.
Christopher Luxon walks into the room. A warm smile on his face. A hand extended to his counterpart.
“We are open for business,” he says confidently. “New Zealand is under new management.”
Luxon with the Phillipines President Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos, son of dictator, Marcos Senior. Ferdinand won his election using a slew of misinformation, including claims then New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Adern, supported him as a candidate.
APP fact check wrote: “False. Ms Ardern has never voiced any public support for Marcos Jr. The only discernible source of the quote is partisan Filipino social media accounts.”
Some in the New Zealand trade contingent silently cringe, and the Chairman of a Kiwi export business later counsels Mr Luxon to stop repeating those phrases.
“New Zealand has never been closed for business.” It’s not good for business to say that. Political vernacular of that stripe had no place in building long term, strategic relationships with other countries, he’s advised.
Still, nothing was going to stop Mr Happy, Confident, Ambitious, Chipper, MoJo.
It was clear Luxon was in his element.
Not in a stifled Kiwi press room taking questions from local media - a media who didn’t yet understand that he was going to be different, better, stronger, and more impressive leader than any Prime Minister in recent history.
Luxon dines publicly with Singaporean influencer Aiken Chia in Asia. Luxon is supported by a social media team of seven, partly paid for by taxpayers. Photo: courtesy RNZ / Craig McCulloch
Luxon glowed during that South East Asia trip.
That much was clear.
And it’s a great thing to see that energy, optimism, confidence and excitement.
I believe Mr Luxon might even believe what he says.
Yet one small wrinkle - he thinks New Zealand is just not good enough.
And he’s supported by similarly bleak Coalition partners. To the right of Luxon, we have an ACT party that tells its loyalists “New Zealand is deeply in the shit.”
Firmly behind Luxon, we have Winston Peters’s New Zealand First party, which is not above multiple conspiracy theories - even if they are just of their own making.
Now I’ve watched Luxon do plenty of press conferences. There are times when he is clearly talking from the gut i.e. from a place of deeply seeded beliefs.
He believes he wants New Zealand to be better. He wants people to pull themselves up and reach for greater heights (like him.) He has no problem with using anecdotes to tarnish those who are lesser. He doesn’t want to coddle “soft” businesses and anyone who he might deem as not ambitious and positive. And he’s also not very interested in the details - the responsibility of getting it right is on others. He’s just the guy at the pulpit telling us what things should be.
Bottom feeders take note.
Luxon’s love is an authoritarian type. His care of the country comes with demands and expectations. But he doesn’t want to know your background, what challenges you faced or had to overcome, or might still be keeping you up at night.
He’s just not happy.
And Luxon, the manager and Prime Minister, is only interested in results.
Everything else is weakness.
One of the very telling interviews Luxon gave was in May when he talked to Newshub’s AM.
After he was confronted with evidence that front-line staff such as border protection officers, and lead paedophile investigators, could get fired as part of his Government’s public sector budget cuts, Luxon flatly denied any responsibility. It was, he insisted, on the leaders of the government departments. Not him or Willis who had directed them to find money and find it quickly in time for Willis’s May budget tax cuts.
Never mind that they had both been travelling the country to assure Kiwis that “no frontline services would be cut.”
Well even without confirmation of those job losses: you don’t cut supermarket shelf stackers without impacting the cashiers pretty quickly. It was always a hapdash and careless exercise where the people who supposedly grew the public sector ‘with unjustifiable incompetence,’ according to National and ACT (never mind population growth and service levels) were the same ones tasked with making the cuts and keeping their jobs at the expense of workers.
Yet, this type of dispassionate, unempathetic leadership comes through frequently from Luxon.
“Being a New Zealander comes with rights but also responsibilities.”
Yes, which is fine as a principle, except he doesn’t seem to care that not everyone is in the same place. And circumstances do matter in the ‘management’ of a country’s well-being. Like economics, society is a system, and you can’t move one part of it, without impinging upon another. In more blunt terms, you can’t under-serve entire segments of the poor or discouraged, and expect it not to affect the ‘other rungs’ of your pyramid.
In unscripted moments, Luxon calls New Zealand a “very negative, wet, whiny, inward-looking country.” (2023)
He’s told right wing radio that this country is too focussed on bottom feeders:
"If you want a go, and you want to make something of yourself, we don't just do bottom feeding and focus on the bottom. We focus on people who want to be positive, and ambitious, aspirational and confident alright." (2022)
Two years ago Luxon was in London, speaking at a right wing think-tank conference. He complained that businesses were being burdened by a government that had “no people in it with any business experience.” Therefore, businesses were being lumped with “extended sick leave, minimum wages, more public holidays” and other extraneous costs.
What? You mean business expenses such as human resources expenditure and employee well-being, Mr Luxon? This is where I start to doubt his acumen.
Then he whinged about how New Zealand businesses are too “soft.”
Last month Luxon boasted that a delegation that accompanied him on a recent trip to Japan were the ‘A-list’ as opposed to the imputed losers on Labour’s delegations, whom he labelled the ‘C-list.’
A small wrinkle again: business leaders that went on a 2023 trip to China with Chris Hipkins included the heads of Fonterra, Air New Zealand, Zespri, Tourism Holdings and Silver Fern Farms.
Business NZ director of advocacy Catherine Beard said businesses will probably “have a bit of a chuckle. I don’t think the delegates really change that much, from mission to mission.”
Luxon has frequently self-lauded his business skills. He once ran a majority government owned airline called Air New Zealand. You may have heard about it.
But frankly I’m not quite sure he is the man for the job anymore. And this is not just about him, by the way.
It’s his whole Government. And frankly, he might even be the best of a bad lot.
Take Transport Minister Simeon Brown. He is investing $70bn into roads over 10 years, while instructing councils they aren’t allowed to implement any road safety measures, irrespective of evidence. He is also doing away with previously tailored speed limits (not blanket, as he claimed) and are replacing it with actual blanket speed increases, as if human lives are a smaller part of the equation than political brownie points and posturing.
Simeon also specifically called out that not one cent could be used to implement cycleways because, that’s right, the ideology that anything anti-pollution, or healthier for the body and environment, is bad for Simeon’s prestige.
When 80% of Auckland schools recently said they did not want Simeon’s blanket speed increases around them, his first reaction was to ask why anyone would want to support “one of Labour's most unpopular policies.”
Does he not understand or relate to child safety when Auckland Transport’s own evidence shows that lower speeds reduce serious injuries by 15% and deaths by nearly half. Does he not know what schools are truly about.
Where is their evidence based approach in any of their policies?
Meanwhile, we’ll have to see if the pleading falls on deaf ears:
"We did have to review the safety of each of the roads [around] our schools and town centres, but we put them in with strong consultation."
In fact, about 80 percent of schools had told council they wanted permanent speed reductions around them.
The council was also reluctant to reverse the speed limits as it could cost them up to $12 million to implement.
"We're happy to review it if certain communities oppose those changes, or don't believe [the lower speed limits] are working."
Ultimately, New Zealand isn’t a corporation.
It’s people, Kiwis, culture, family, relationships, care, responsibility, and it’s the natural world we subsist within.
And that deserves much more care than what ‘Luxon, Seymour and Peters Company’ is showing.
Tautoko those comments! It grinds my gears that so called journalists, or is that hacks, like Malpass and Trevett play fanboys and talk up the emperor without clothes useless junket to the US when he will actually achieve sweet fa!
Thank you A prime minister who mocks his constituents is not fit to hold that office and should be removed.