Christopher Luxon’s long, slow walk to oblivion - Simon Wilson

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon: Can he pull his party out of the mire? Photo / George Heard

THREE KEY FACTS

• The Government coalition partners have slipped in recent polls.
• Act’s Treaty Principles Bill has caused fierce debate among the coalition partners, as well as in the wider community.
• Prime Minister Christopher Luxon is accused of giving too much slack to the other party leaders in the coalition.

Poor old Christopher Luxon. Everything the Prime Minister thought he knew about being the boss has turned to mush.

His Government should be an easy 10 points ahead in the polls by now and he should be a political darling, at least to the people who voted for him. The guy who really does get things done.

But no. Luxon’s Government had an action-packed 2024, full of lists and goals, and voters are saying yeah, nah. The Opposition was in disarray: the Greens had an annus horribilis and Labour responded to its electoral humbling in 2023 by doing a year of penance. Didn’t hurt either of them.

Support for the Government is, at best, stuck. Recent polls suggest it’s declining. If this keeps up, there will be panic, not only in Act and NZ First, which are showing signs of it already, but among National MPs too.

The path Luxon is now trudging along leads to the potential ignominy of a one-term Government, something not seen here in 50 years.

It’s not all his fault or even his Government’s. The disillusionment runs far deeper than that. This could be the start of something: a whole succession of one-term governments.

People are angry and the anger flicks to fight mode. You see it everywhere: from driver behaviour to family-harm statistics, attacks on bus drivers and shop workers, fury on social media. Adults thinking it’s okay to rampage into a library to stop an event for children being held.

The Government cops way more than its fair share of the blame for the things that seem out of control or unfixable. But when people feel helpless, they want someone to blame.

Although, in defence of the angries, if a political party promises to fix problems, wins power and then doesn’t fix those problems, they should expect there will be blood.

Popular anger is not the principal reason Luxon and his Government are falling in the polls. Voters are worried most about the cost of living and then a bunch of other things. Same as it always was.

But there’s no magic wand Luxon or anyone else can wave over the economy. It’s a long hard slog for every Government, whatever their policy platform.

And day by day, the anger pollutes everything. It puts politicians on notice and defines the world in which they must operate. Political leaders must have the skills to get ahead of it.

Luxon’s coalition partners don’t do that. They stoke the fires, and he lets them get away with it. Act and NZ First are both more interested in entertaining their own bases than helping to govern the country constructively.

Whether it’s driving a car up the steps of Parliament or promising species extinction, undoing gun controls and worker protections or going to war on “wokeness”, they do it with no regard for the integrity and credibility of the Government as a whole.

They must think inflaming a culture war works.

But why? The angry populism of Act and NZ First turns out to have a different impact from, say, the fear-mongering of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party in Britain or Donald Trump’s triumphalism in America: it’s not building either Act nor NZ First a bigger voter base. They’re stuck in the polls too.

But it is destroying the credibility of the Prime Minister.

The fate of Act’s Treaty Principles Bill is highly instructive. It’s done nothing for Act’s popularity, but it has allowed Te Pāti Māori to increase its organising capacity by an immeasurably large amount, not to mention boost its parliamentary skills. Act possibly did not see that coming.

And it has divided the National Party at the very time its leader needs them to stand purposefully and united behind him.

That, in my view, points to the real reason Luxon didn’t go to Waitangi. He wants discontented party supporters to forget all about this bill. He’ll do nothing to put the focus on it and he certainly won’t stand next to David Seymour when it’s being debated.

David Seymour, in dark glasses, arriving for the pōwhiri at Waitangi this year. Photo / Dean Purcell

Luxon is far from innocent in this, however. His management of the coalition talks in late 2023 produced the bill. He says his skill set is as a great negotiator and an experienced executive leader who knows how to build a team and get everyone working together.

But the evidence suggests the contrary. Which begs the question: what can he do?

Luxon’s inability to control his coalition partners is not normal. Dame Jacinda Ardern’s first Government included the Greens and NZ First, who hated each other, but she did not allow that to undermine the coherence of the Government as a whole. Sir John Key did the same with Act and the Māori Party when he was in power.

Ardern and Key knew how to manage Seymour and Peters; Luxon doesn’t seem to have a clue.

Nor is his problem with rogue populism confined to the coalition partners.

Among National’s own senior ranks, Simeon Brown’s penchant for putting ideological fixations ahead of good government is well-known. Think the clampdown on cycleways and higher speed limits the experts say will very probably increase deaths on the roads.

And in my opinion Chris Bishop, Minister of Infrastructure, housing and now transport, has the same instinct for ideology ahead of good ideas and populism ahead of good planning.

Last week he announced a cap on new state housing that the construction, welfare and social housing sectors are all dismayed about.

On Sunday, Engineering NZ warned that so many engineers have left for Australia and California, we now have an engineering skills crisis. Despite all the rhetoric about creating an infrastructure pipeline and going for growth, the Government’s focus on debt reduction means construction work is not expanding, but drying up.

These things add up and people notice.

It’s true many of New Zealand’s woes are not Luxon’s fault, or the fault of anyone else here. There are clowns in the White House, although it’s not funny. The global economy is fragile, climate threats grow ever larger, Ukraine and Palestine are geopolitical nightmares and tensions are rising between the US and China.

One or more of these things could spill directly into our lives at any time.

But that’s the world we live in. We’re a country with a leader who has shown he can’t manage effectively in these relatively calm times. Pray we don’t have to find out what he’ll be like in a real crisis, because the signs are not good.

Is Luxon on the long, slow walk to oblivion? He struggles to lead his team well, to inspire popular confidence and to hose down the culture warriors. And people really do not feel better about the cost of living.

The real damage, for National, is that every outrageous thing ministers are allowed to say pushes the Government further away from the voters the party should be taking special care of. The ones who might vote Labour or Green.

Those voters want better news for their purses, yes. But most of them also understand the climate crisis is real and do not accept Luxon’s own insistence that environmental and economic goals should be separated. And they find it abhorrent the Government has entertained proposals infused with racism.

What Luxon’s actions tell these voters is that he does not understand the country we live in.

Moreover, many of them are not impressed with an economic strategy that benefits the highly profitable supermarkets, banks and power companies. Especially when that strategy hurts those hoping their pay packets will not fall behind inflation while their housing costs surge ahead.

The sense of fairness those concerns reflect is part of what this country is, too.

If Labour and the Greens get themselves seriously back in the game, and who would doubt, on current polling, that they can, there’s trouble ahead for Luxon. He’s given it his absolutely, determinedly, laser-focused best shot, and yet he’s stuck. What else has he got? I think it is unlikely that his party will go into election year tolerating this.

By my count, National has at least four Cabinet ministers who probably believe they could do a better job. That’s rare.

I’m not saying they’re right to think that, or that I’d welcome them into the office.

But the damage Luxon is doing to the party and therefore to himself is far bigger than he seems to realise. Especially as his party has four senior MPs it will feel it can turn to, if or when it becomes necessary. Watch this space.