OPINION
“We live in a fantastic country, don’t we?” Christopher Luxon is cruising the Viaduct. It’s Friday lunchtime and he’s working the restaurants, a big media posse in his wake. He bounces from table to table, grinning, shaking hands, chatting away.
“What are you celebrating?” It’s a birthday.
“How long will you be here?”
“All night!”
And time and again, he opens with that line: We live in a fantastic country, don’t we.
This is clever. If you’re not already on his side, he’s just said something you agree with, so maybe you’re on his side after all?
He’s done it as a question, so now you’re thinking about it, and about him. And he’s relentlessly, infectiously cheerful. Who doesn’t appreciate that, especially in small doses?
It takes skill to do this: to engage, to reassure and make strangers feel good, and then quickly move on. It’s much harder than it looks. And despite predictions to the contrary, Luxon has turned out to be very good at it.
Even when, as on this occasion, he’s among his own people. Those Friday long-lunchers in the Viaduct might be the most satisfied people in the country right now. Which doesn’t stop them nodding enthusiastically when Luxon talks about how awful life in this fabulous country has become under Labour.
Walkabouts are a great feature of our democracy, because you get the chance to decide for yourself something about their character.
Do they seem genuine or full of it, trustworthy or devious, inspired by worthwhile values or ego, knowledgeable or an idiot? A person who can get things done, or a bluster merchant?
It’s not always straightforward. Relentless good cheer might be likeable, but is it trustworthy? When you look them in the eye, you get to decide.
It’s great that walkabouts are back, and it’s worth remembering the reasons they stopped.
One was Covid. Crowds and public events stopped being a thing, and the evidence from overseas suggests around 10,000 people are alive in this country today because of that.
But after the lockdowns, there was a bigger reason. Jacinda Ardern had to stop doing walkabouts because of constant threats to her safety and the barrage of obscenities screamed at her by a tiny but obsessed, deeply misogynist and profoundly anti-democratic fringe.
We have not seen that level of hatred in this campaign. Luxon certainly doesn’t get it, for two reasons. He did not have to decide how to limit suffering and maintain the national good during the biggest crisis most of us have lived through. And he is not a woman.
Still, for all the value of walkabouts, a minute of chat doesn’t get you a lot of substance. We need that too.
Oddly, the main parties’ finance spokespeople, Grant Robertson and Nicola Willis, both present with more substance - and are more entertaining - than their leaders. They’ve been going head-to-head in debates around the country, both of them putting real information, real values and points of view on display, both projecting a real sense they can get things done.
Their most recent clash was on TVNZ’s Q&A on Sunday, where they went at it for an absorbing hour of TV, filled with real ideas and information. (They meet again this morning in a livestreamed debate sponsored by MYOB and NZME, publisher of the Herald.)
Imagine how exciting this election would be if Willis and Robertson were the party leaders. Why aren’t they? Please don’t let it be that she’s a woman and he’s gay.
It’s a mistake to assume voters in the broad middle of the political spectrum want something bland. They want politicians who will give them hope and pride. Who don’t speak in platitudes or pander to prejudice.
Mind you, because Robertson and Willis present with more substance than their bosses, it doesn’t follow they always tell the truth.
Robertson is right that National will have to cut frontline public services in order to fund its promised tax cuts. But he’s wrong to imply that won’t also happen under Labour. They intend to cut public services too.
As for Willis, her signature attack line is that “Labour has an insatiable appetite for more taxes”. But the opposite is true: Labour has bent over backwards not to introduce wide-ranging tax reform.
And she, just as much as her boss, is responsible for the hot mess of incoherence they call a tax policy.
And where’s Chippy in all this? The campaigning style of Prime Minister Chris Hipkins begs a big question: just how should we judge good leadership?
He’s a better debater in Parliament than Luxon, but how important is that? He’s not relentlessly cheerful, but does that matter?
He doesn’t always manage to package his party’s achievements into soundbites, even though several of his ministers have provided enough cues.
Robertson points to data that show we have the fastest-growing economy among comparable countries in the OECD. Health Minister Ayesha Verrall says the post-Covid backlog of 50,000 people on the waitlist for non-orthopaedic surgery is down to 9300 and will be cleared by the end of the year.
Police Minister Ginny Anderson talks about the causal links between domestic violence and other violent crimes. It’s hard, complex and never makes a good headline, but breaking those links is essential and, with the Greens’ Marama Davidson as the minister in charge, it’s started to happen.
Corrections Minister Kelvin Davis has launched an intensive programme for 60 of “the country’s most prolific young offenders”, designed to provide the wraparound services they and their families need to turn them away from crime.
Environment Minister David Parker has reformed the Resource Management Act, an achievement that defeated every one of his predecessors. Housing Minister Megan Woods has overseen the construction of 13,000 state houses in the largest home-building programme we’ve seen since the 1950s.
Hipkins doesn’t have a great story to tell. We all know that. Things could and should be better. But he’s got a better story than the one his political foes tell about him. Those achievements are all substantial.
So what’s Chippy up to? Perhaps he’s trying to project some personal qualities that don’t come across easily in a walkabout. He’s not Mr Relentlessly Cheerful, he’s the Unexcitable Guy.
The guy who knows most political challenges are not black and white, and wants to project balance and care. A calm head in a crisis.
We already know this is largely true: as Minister of Health, Hipkins was a prominent and unflappable senior member of the Government’s Covid team. We also know we have not seen the last of crisis.
It’s obvious Chippy needs to get better at knockout soundbites: being the Unexcitable Guy may not be a winning election strategy. But those things don’t make him a bad Prime Minister.
Everyone says they want less style and more substance in politics. For better or worse, he’s testing that proposition in a very high-stakes way.
And those stakes are getting higher. National has released its “plan to accelerate New Zealand”: higher speed limits will be reintroduced to our roads.
“First, do no harm,” said Nicola Willis on Sunday, apropos another topic. But people will die from this plan.
The data are clear. Since 2020, there have been 30 per cent fewer deaths on the roads where Auckland Transport lowered the speed limits. Elsewhere in the city, deaths rose by 9 per cent.
In March 2022, Waka Kotahi reduced the speed limit on the Napier-Taupō road. An independent review of the first year, by Ernst and Young, found that 34 crashes were avoided. The economic benefit was put at $93 million.
The upside was merely that journey times over the 76km road decreased between 36 seconds and 3.6 minutes.
National has wrapped this policy in rhetoric about an “anti-car ideology”. If they really want to make car travel more appealing, here’s a tip. Make the roads safer.
And another, while we’re about it: don’t remove the clean-car subsidy. Which points to the other problem with this policy: it will raise emissions.
Style versus substance. Populism versus evidence-based policy. The political term began with thousands of lives saved in a pandemic and, incredibly, it is ending with a major party announcing policy that will cost lives.
But hey, we live in a fantastic country, don’t we? And that guy who thinks he’s a brilliant driver and nearly killed you by cutting you off? He’s going to feel like he’s the king of the road.
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.
