He added, "We've all got better at it because of our struggles over the Treaty."
When English delivered that speech in 2017, he led a government that included Te Pāti Māori and one that could point to some significant achievements for Māoridom.
In fact, elements of the Key/English record were a direct ideological challenge to the assumption that only the left of politics could deliver meaningful results for Māori.
Take Treaty settlements for example.
Christopher Finlayson won huge respect across the aisle for the settlements he reached as the Treaty Negotiations Minister, some of which included innovative co-governance arrangements that gave local iwi a direct voice in decisions about the future of resources stolen from them.
In a recent essay, Finlayson argued this approach was born out of his centre-right politics.
"The question becomes," he said "why should the state be the one to control everything? Why can't there be principles of sharing power?"
That same thinking is evident in Whānau Ora, an effective marriage of the principles of Tino rangatiratanga and the conservative preference for small government.
It's classic compassionate conservatism – agreeing with the progressive left's good intentions but questioning why those intentions have to be carried out by a government bureaucracy that can be unresponsive, unwieldy, and at times actively hostile to Māori self-determination.
It says something about how effective that programme has been that the current Labour Government has not only kept it but significantly boosted its funding.
So, given all this success, how did things change so quickly in the last few years that Christopher Luxon now can't even use te reo on his Facebook page without his own voters piling abuse on him?
The rot set in during National's disastrous years in the political wilderness, when a desperate Judith Collins decided she needed to out race-bait Act to secure her leadership.
The result was months of campaigning on He Puapua – the idea there was a secret plan by Māori and the left to overturn New Zealand's democracy.
In reality, of course, He Puapua was a largely unknown report within government that had been written by academics and had sat on the shelf for two years.
Collins' gambit failed to either improve the party's polling or save her leadership but it did help convince a portion of the centre-right base – especially older Pākehā voters – that their interests were under imminent attack from Māori.
Ironically, government policies like the proposed Māori Health Authority, which actually share more than a fair bit of their intellectual DNA with Key/English programmes like Whānau Ora, became the chief target of this fear.
The problem for National is that racial resentment and Pākehā fear aren't forces that can be summoned for a moment and discarded when you're done with them.
Collins' legacy to her party is a section of their voter base impassioned about stopping Māori progress and are now emboldened to vent their rage.
And with this week's TVNZ poll showing National unable to govern without Te Pāti Māori, that could be a damaging legacy indeed.
Hayden Munro was the campaign manager for Labour's successful 2020 election win. He now works in corporate PR for Wellington-based firm Capital Communications and Government Relations.
