Election 2023: Victorious Christopher Luxon wants to do things ‘differently’ but is doing things the same

Prime Minister designate Christopher Luxon greets his caucus colleagues after speaking to media at Parliament. Photo / George Heard

Christopher Luxon, the Prime Minister-designate, walked victorious into one of his last caucus meetings as Opposition leader on Tuesday morning.

The National Party is beginning the process of packing up from the third floor of Parliament House, the traditional home of oppositions, and moving to the Beehive.

He was greeted with applause as he walked into the room. Luxon joked that it was a very different circumstance to the one that greeted him and other new MPs after National’s devastating loss in 2020.

“This has been a bit of an empty room the last three years. I hope we’ve got enough chairs for everybody,” Luxon said.

“I think it’ll be one of the great political comebacks in New Zealand’s political history,” he said.

Luxon, for the third day in a row, reiterated that he would be doing coalition negotiations “differently” yet not giving detailed accounts of how they were progressing.

Prime Minister-elect Christopher Luxon and Nicola Willis speak to media at Parliament. Photo / George Heard

He said he disagreed with the “blow-by-blow” negotiations going “through the media” following past elections.

Luxon suggested that contra what the other two negotiating partners might want, he was happy to take his time and run down the clock until special votes are counted before doing a deal.

He would use that time to build relationships, he said.

“The approach is very simple, I’m going to use the next three weeks until the special votes are fully counted to actually progress the relationships and the arrangements with each party, the way we work with them will be different,” Luxon said.

However, this is not exactly different to how prior negotiations were conducted. While in 2017, NZ First leader Winston Peters regularly spoke to media during negotiations, mainly because they were camped outside the lifts beneath his office, the leaders of the other two parties did not.

Luxon also faced questions for not allowing his MPs to speak to the media ahead of their first caucus meeting together. Usually MPs are stopped by members of the Parliamentary Press Gallery on their way into their weekly caucus meeting.

For some MPs, it is the only time of the week when they are available to speak to the media.

For their first caucus meeting, outgoing 2020-2023 MPs and the party’s new caucus had already gathered in the caucus room when Luxon had arrived, meaning they could not be interviewed.

Luxon said he was not inaugurating a new practice of clamping down on access to his caucus.

“We’ll make our people available to you exactly as we’ve planned. Just today is different because it’s their first time here and we’ll bring them together,” he said.

Luxon said the new regime was “just for today” and the only two portfolios that had been “locked in” were him as Prime Minister and Nicola Willis as Finance Minister.

This is at odds with remarks made in his Monday morning media round suggesting Mark Mitchell was locked in as Police Minister.

Luxon on Tuesday said Mitchell would make a “great” Police Minister, but the portfolio hadn’t been locked in.

Thomas Coughlan is Deputy Political Editor and covers politics from Parliament. He has worked for the Herald since 2021 and has worked in the press gallery since 2018.