OPINION
The Prime Minister is planning a major State of the Nation address in the near-future. It’s not before time. And it better be good.
Beyond getting rid of the Labour circus, Christopher Luxon was elected primarily to fix the economy and lower the cost of living, by which he presumably meant getting inflation back within the 1-3 per cent target as soon as possible rather than deflation.
His main strategy was to reverse the astonishing and ineffectual increase in government spending over the last six years, from $81 billion in 2017/18, to $108b by the end of the Labour-NZ First-Green regime, to the ridiculous $140b forecast for 2023/24 after Labour’s three years governing alone.
Luxon also promised to hustle on the world stage and restore our mojo.
At the same time, there were meant to be tax cuts. Long-term productivity would be improved by a big back-to-basics push in education, a crackdown on crime and restoring balance to race relations.
As has sadly become the practice under MMP, the slogans were pretty much it.
Still, we were told, the new Government would work through the summer to begin the new year raring to go. Yet there’s been no real sign of it so far, so that the agenda is being set entirely by others.
It’s not unusual for Treaty and race relations issues to be prominent through January and early February. In the footsteps of Don Brash in 2004, Act leader David Seymour has benefited, and also used the attention to make the case for a flatter tax system than Luxon or Finance Minister Nicola Willis have indicated.
The opportunity to stake out new ground was obvious as Labour is almost entirely invisible and irrelevant, having not yet held its usual new-year strategy retreat, with an inevitable and necessary ideological struggle set to begin and a doomed leader.
The new duo of Foreign Minister Winston Peters and Defence Minister Judith Collins also used the vacuum and the terrorist attacks in the Red Sea to accelerate New Zealand’s full return to the Western alliance much faster than Luxon had himself proposed.
Since the end of the Cold War, New Zealand’s foreign policy has sometimes been derided as a mere extension of trade policy. The hawkish Peters-Collins combo is making it clear foreign policy will now be led by national security concerns.
One wonders what National’s pro-China lobby, including Luxon’s mentor Sir John Key, makes of Peters and Collins’ bold moves.
The gap created by a lack of clear prime-ministerial leadership has also meant slip-ups that might ordinarily be almost ignored are filling news bulletins.
Whether it will take two or three years to train a net 500 new police officers is hardly a big deal. In any case, it’s not even what Labour’s Stuart Nash achieved as Minister of Police.
But, in the absence of a clear sense of direction from the top, Police Minister Mark Mitchell’s indication it could take three years created an opportunity for Peters to assert NZ First’s expectation that whatever is written in the coalition agreements is inviolable, unless there is unequivocal advance agreement to a change by the parties.
Luxon made the right call siding with Peters and giving Mitchell a bit of a ticking-off. But were there a clear programme, Mitchell’s faux pas would hardly have made the news.
Likewise, Luxon’s misreading of the recent order by the International Court of Justice concerning Gaza forced him to make a rare and embarrassing prime-ministerial correction in Parliament to avoid facing the Privileges Committee.
Again, that would have been the merest footnote in the day’s news were the new Government clearly working on a meaningful agenda. Lists of unrelated bullet-points don’t count.
The Prime Minister has clearly done a good job managing his party. He unified its team, stopping them slagging one another off and leaking to whomever would listen. National’s new intake of backbenchers includes some of the best new centre-right talent to have arrived in Parliament since 2002 and 2005. And, despite Luxon’s debacle of a tax policy, National still won 38 per cent of the vote and formed a Government.
But it often seems Luxon thinks such managerialism is where his job begins and ends.
There is something to be said for a Prime Minister who lets their ministers get on with their jobs without the overweening and ultimately failed micromanagement of the Key and Ardern regimes.
Some of history’s greatest political leaders were the least engaged in the details, not least Ronald Reagan. Others, like Margaret Thatcher, were all over everything.
Either way, it is still the Prime Minister’s job, as leader of the country, to articulate the themes and purpose that unify governments and give ministers a sense of direction for their work.
This must be much more about poetry than prose, let alone sterile spreadsheets and KPIs.
Luxon’s job is not just to collect a set of near-random bullet-points from his ministers and hold them accountable for whatever bullet-points they send in.
Yet, so far, the idea of it being the job of the leader of the country to give coherence to those bullet-points – or, better still, provide the vision that serves to write them – seems beyond him. At the other end of the spectrum, so does the idea that it is his job to address questions of ministers’ propriety in a direct and business-like manner.
In place of both seems to be his tendency to express enthusiasm about the banal.
“What I think is fantastic,” he gushed embarrassingly in Parliament on Wednesday, “is we have an associate minister with delegation for reducing smoking. She’s incredibly focused on that goal, and she’s asked her officials for a range of advice to actually lower smoking in New Zealand. That’s a good thing.”
This was in response to questions about whether tobacco lobbyists helped write the smoking policies of any of the coalition parties.
That question has not yet been adequately answered.
It may well be a good thing that one of Luxon’s ministers is responsible for reducing smoking, but there’s nothing “fantastic” or even unusual about it. Since at least 1984, there’s always been one, either the Minister of Health or one of their associates, and their work has always been measurable.
They’ve even done quite a good job, with daily smoking rates falling from around a third of the population being smokers in 1984 to below 7 per cent last year.
If he wants his Government to unite the country behind an economic and education reform programme, the Prime Minister will need to do much better than trying to present long-standing bureaucratic practices as somehow visionary and new.
Matthew Hooton has over 30 years’ experience in political and corporate communications and strategy for clients in Australasia, Asia, Europe and North America, including the National and Act parties and the mayor of Auckland.
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