Luxon has been in Parliament for less than two years and leader for just eight months. It takes most MPs six years and three elections to become effective. What is remarkable is not his occasional slip-up, but that he has made so few.
National received just 25.58 per cent of the vote in the last election. Now it is New Zealand's most popular party. The Tauranga byelection confirmed the opinion polls.
Luxon has the great advantage of not only having a good CV, but of looking like a prime minister. Nothing else has changed, so he has to be given the credit for National's revival.
The next election is now Luxon's to lose. Labour's only hope of re-election is to politically destroy the National leader.
There is a tried and tested formula. Accuse the Opposition Leader of having no policy. And when he does announce some policy, put it on trial and find it guilty.
When Luxon announced a detailed youth unemployment policy on Sunday, some 15 months before the next election, Labour could not wait to find it "guilty". The attacks would have been more effective if ministers could agree on what is wrong with National's policy. Minister for Social Development Carmel Sepuloni says it is because the policies have no merit. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says it is because the policies "already exist". Of course both could be true.
The apparatchiks are surprised Luxon has chosen youth unemployment as that is not an issue in any poll. Luxon also identified the cost of living as a crisis when inflation was not an issue. His identification of the issue and Ardern's dismissal of any cost of living crisis is the reason why voters now say National is better able to handle the economy.
There is great unease over how the young are faring under Labour. Just 46 per cent of pupils attended school regularly in term one. There is a 49 per cent increase in the number of young people on the Jobseeker benefit. When Luxon says "get the kids back to school" and that young adults need to "find a job and become independent", the country agrees.
Luxon's statement to the National Party conference that - "as a nation, we all bear the costs when welfare becomes not a safety net to catch people if they fall, but a drag net that pulls the vulnerable in" echoes Norman Kirk. Kirk used to say that welfare needs to be not a safety net that catches, but a springboard that propels back.
While Luxon is winning this policy debate, he would do well to note the message in this graffiti, which I saw on a wall in Sydney, regarding Australia's longest serving Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies (nicknamed "Ming"). "Oh for the days of Ming: He promised us nothing and my God he delivered."
It is Labour, as the party of reform, that must campaign on policy. Conservatives campaign to be better managers and to preserve New Zealand values.
Luxon's rise in the polls is not stalled because of the abortion issue or any silly media post. His rise is paused because no one knows what Luxon means when he said on Sunday that he "wants to live in a New Zealand that honours the Treaty".
What Treaty? Is he referring to Labour's radical revisionist Treaty that provides for co-government with an unaccountable, self-selected elite? Or does he mean the Treaty signed in 1840 which in article three guaranteed everyone equal citizenship?
Unlike Luxon, David Seymour used his party's annual conference to clearly state Act's rejection of co-government and support for liberal democracy's one person, one vote. It is why Act is rising in the polls.
A true conservative does not campaign claiming to have the most radical new policy. A real conservative pledges not to do anything that might damage New Zealand's values. When Luxon campaigns to do nothing that might harm our liberal democracy, he will win by the landslide.
- Richard Prebble is a former leader of the Act Party and a former member of the Labour Party.
