The National Party leader might want to take a page out of Prime Minister Chris Hipkins’ book, and focus on the here and now.
The here and now for Luxon is that Hipkins has well and truly grabbed the agenda by the throat at the startof the year. Hipkins has come out looking very much like he wants to win an election.
Luxon has not. He needs to change that, and he needs to change it fast.
He has to somehow muscle his way back into the agenda. That may start in a week when Luxon delivers his state of the nation speech just before MPs return to Parliament in mid-February.
It needs to be compelling.
It’s no longer enough for Luxon to rely on people getting sick of Labour or to roll out the same old lines he was using against Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern – that the Labour Government cannot deliver and is out of touch with New Zealanders’ concerns.
He has to switch from that partly because Hipkins is hellbent on proving he is wrong – and the early polls show Hipkins is making progress in that regard.
Illustration / Guy Body
Those polls, 1News Kantar Public and Newshub’s Reid Research, both showed that what Hipkins has succeeded in doing was getting people to listen to Labour again.
Now Hipkins has to keep them on the phone. So his stranglehold on the agenda will not necessarily end soon: if he does what he says, the next weeks will see a bit of a rolling maul of announcements as he completes his stocktake and starts scrapping or benching problem areas for Labour. It is already apparent that if he considers something is causing Labour more problem than it’s worth, it is gone. There is speculation it will drop its plans for wide-spread speed limit reductions. That has come second in polls on the list of reforms vexing the voters.
And that will start to starve the Opposition of attack lines.
He has made his first cost-of-living announcement by reversing the decision to end fuel tax cuts. It was not earth-shatteringly new, but it is something that benefits people’s pockets. A good politician realises that once people start getting a bit of money, it’s very hard to take it away from them again.
And Hipkins has said it will be just the first of the cost-of-living announcements, giving a clear signal the Budget will deliver more and Labour’s election manifesto after that.
Nor can Luxon rely on Hipkins stumbling on the job. In an election year, every misstep is magnified - and Luxon is the more likely to misstep.
Hipkins was never a slouch when it came to being good at politics, but he’s so far proved to be a more canny operator than expected now that he has the authority. He has somehow almost overnight repackaged Labour as something a bit new.
He’s been competent in his press conferences, swiping off questions he is not yet wanting to answer or does not yet know the answer to. He does not seem intimidated by the job.
He has not fallen into the trap so many new leaders fall into of creating policy on the hop just for the sake of giving an answer. And he has sounded like a normal human being when he has answered.
That makes life difficult for Luxon, who primps his corporate credentials as an asset but also sounds like a corporate machine in doing so.
Luxon’s other repeated line is that he will get things done. That invites the question of what he will get done. So far the answer has been crickets – beyond tax cuts of some variety, repealing Three Waters and boot camps. A bit of what he would do and a bit less of what he thinks Labour hasn’t done would be good.
Luxon is also far too often drowned out by ACT leader David Seymour. Of late, Luxon has been little more than background noise – and that is because he has not been saying much of note.
At the moment a chunk of the newly regained support Hipkins has got will be as wobbly as blancmange. But Hipkins could lock in that support lift from his honeymoon period and build on it.
One of the indicators in the 1 News Kantar Public poll that will have given Labour hope of that was the question testing economic confidence. It’s a question that reflects confidence in the Government to a degree.
It showed a jump in optimism compared to November last year – up 10 points to 28 per cent, albeit from a low base. Pessimism had dropped more dramatically – down 20 points to 41 per cent.
That could be simply people feeling a bit better after a summer holiday or it could be the buds of a second spring for Labour.
The Auckland floods will be a factor in whether Hipkins can seize that and build on it. Hipkins knows from bitter experience that in some ways the immediate response is the easy bit. When it gets hard is as the weeks go by and people are still looking at the damage and trying to get back to normal.
The grind of that takes a toll. They know a government is not to blame for weather but it risks throwing into the spotlight other problems that are the government’s responsibility to fix: the labour and skills shortage, the cost of construction material. Any such disgruntlement will only be fuelled by the Opposition parties keeping an eagle eye on every development. That is what Hipkins cannot afford to let happen.
There is often a temptation for leaders of the Opposition to go a bit over the top when it comes to getting attention and relevancy. Then there are those who go to the other extent: and sit there and wait. Both result in a restive caucus.
A happy medium has to be found and that is where Luxon is struggling at the moment.
At Waitangi – the first Luxon has attended as leader – he has gone for the minimum time possible, just one day before heading back to Auckland.
In one respect, that’s understandable: Waitangi has always been a time when the focus is on the governing party, and former PM Jacinda Ardern’s efforts furthered that when she started attending for a week.
But Luxon should not necessarily just cede the ground completely, especially now Hipkins has taken over. He wants to be the Prime Minister – and part and parcel of that is setting out what that looks like for relations with Maori.
People want to hear what he has to say, and not just in his speech from the paepae at the formal powhiri. And he needs to be able to defend himself from Hipkins’ claim on Friday that National and ACT had been whipping up fear around race relations for political gain.
