National leader Christopher Luxon will seek to reclaim the narrative this week. Photo / Jed Bradley
OPINION:
Over the 2021-22 summer break, National Party leader Christopher Luxon, barely a month into the job, invited his “kitchen cabinet” to his Onetangi holiday home for a strategy session.
Nicola Willis and Chris Bishop were there, as was newly appointed chief of staff Cam Burrows.
Simon Bridges, who was brought into the tent as part of a deal with Luxon to not formally contest the leadership race, was invited but didn’t come (he was in Queenstown).
The newly-formed shadow kitchen Cabinet set out the year and how they might make a dent in Labour’s commanding poll lead of 10 or so points.
It worked.
By March, following the outbreak of war in Ukraine, it was clear the “transitory” inflation warned of at the end of 2021 was not so transitory. Finance Minister Grant Robertson’s record $6 billion operating allowance, announced in December 2021 as a downpayment on health reform, began to look like a reckless gamble with the CPI.
The polling climbed precipitously until about February of that year. It all seemed too easy. People switched on to National in a way they had not done since the pandemic. It wasn’t Jacindamania, true, but the party polling had a 3 in front of it, rather than a 2 .
But National hit a wall exactly a year ago, when it touched 38 per cent in the February 2022 Taxpayers Union-Curia poll (Curia also does National’s internal polling). There it has roughly stayed, duking it out with Labour in the margin-of-error zone to maintain a slight lead in the high thirties.
Luxon wisely stayed quiet over the last summer, when New Zealanders prefer to get their politics from the chardonnay-fuelled rantings of their families than from actual politicians.
He might have regained the agenda in mid-January at his caucus retreat, had Jacinda Ardern not resigned hours after his now-forgotten reshuffle.
His next opportunity to bend the all-important “narrative” to his will should have been his State of the Nation speech, which is usually when Opposition leaders try set the scene, particularly for an election year.
Luxon was meant to announce some long-awaited policy, neutering the entirely fair criticism from Labour that he had plenty of ideas about what was going wrong, but little notion of what he’d do differently.
The party worked up a cost-of-living policy. The announcement was to be made by Luxon, but it brought in Willis, wearing her finance hat.
Alas for National, this was unhelpfully scheduled for the weekend Cyclone Gabrielle hit, and it had to be cancelled. It was tentatively rescheduled, but cancelled again. It’s been rescheduled again, and will take place on Sunday in Auckland.
Instead of making a hip pocket cost-of-living slash, the party’s first election-year policy launch was its alternative Three Waters.
Launched on Saturday - the quietest day in the weekly news cycle - at the party’s BlueGreens forum far away from national media, the water policy was found to lack buoyancy and swiftly sank … that is until Te Whatu Ora chairman Rob Campbell took issue with it and got himself fired from not one but two directorships.
But Luxon was nowhere to be seen in any of it.
In fact, with just one week of proper parliamentary sitting and just one leader-to-leader Question Time since December, Luxon has been out of the spotlight for nearly a quarter of a year.
His opposite number, Chris Hipkins, has had the opposite treatment, enjoying a flurry of attention after Ardern’s shock resignation and his elevation to the leadership, followed by a few weeks of Covid-style rolling coverage after the cyclone.
This showed up in the polling. National plunged to 34 per cent in the February Taxpayers’ Union poll, his equal second-worst performance since taking the leadership.
As they have so often these past five years, National tongues began to wag sweet what ifs …
Perhaps inured to political logic after the last three years of chaos capped off with Ardern’s improbable resignation, National figures, including MPs, began pondering an improbable leadership change of their own.
Part of this was prompted by decisions taken by Luxon himself, particularly the unlikely decision he made to promote Judith Collins into his top 10, rocketing her nine places up the rankings.
National sources reckon this is a way of buying insurance against an admittedly highly unlikely leadership challenge in the event the party’s polling craters back into the 20s. Collins is said to bring with her a handful of supporters, a sizeable portion of the 17 necessary for Luxon to survive a challenge.
Nevertheless, if in the unlikely event of an emergency, floor lighting guided Luxon to the exit, the logical candidate to replace him is said to be Willis.
Willis is not agitating for the leadership, but this has not stopped colleagues pondering whether she’d be a safe replacement if the Luxon experiment failed.
There’s a detente between Willis, her ally, Bishop and the sizeable conservative backbench. Both rankled some members of caucus with their role in the Todd Muller coup - but they’re two of the party’s best performers and as long as they keep performing, the backbench is largely happy. That doesn’t translate, however, into backing for a spill.
One of the great mysteries of the Luxon takeover is what accommodation Willis and Bishop came to that put Willis in the deputy position. Shortly after Collins was rolled, Bishop teased his own candidacy in a Newstalk ZB interview before going quiet and emerging as a backer of Willis and Luxon. There are unconfirmed reports of a pact stronger than the informal Ardern-Robertson arrangement and more akin to the famous Granita Pact between UK Labour’s Tony Blair and Gordon Brown that propelled the former to the leadership in exchange for a later transition of power to Brown.
Caucus sources say she is not currently agitating for a change - and there’s no evidence there’s one in the works. Willis’ allies are not floating the possibility with other members of caucus.
No.
This is just the idle contemplation of MPs wondering what fresh turmoil might strike should the political winds blow unfavourably. Everyone admits such a change is unlikely and not currently in train - but if there’s a lesson from 2023 it’s that it’s no bad thing to have good insurance.
Speculation over summer was fed by Hipkins’ cyclone poll bump and Luxon’s decision to stay out of the limelight in the immediate recovery (a conscious decision based on how Simon Bridges waded into Covid-19 politics too early with a Facebook post that set in motion the final act of his leadership).
The other reason a change is unlikely is there’s no clear constituency in the current caucus for a change. The caucus heavily skews conservative and therefore instinctively more inclined towards Luxon than Willis. Luxon has also resurrected National’s polling to the point that there isn’t a backbench constituency of MPs likely to lose their jobs at the election who will pull behind any candidate who can “stop the bleeding”.
The caucus is less divided than it has been in the past. But there are rifts (as there are in every caucus - just ask Labour about co-governance!).
Gerry Brownlee made noises in a Newstalk ZB interview that the party was contemplating backing away from the bipartisan housing accord that allows urban infill. Bishop swiftly quashed any notion the party was divided on the issue (which would be especially embarrassing as the accord was devised by Willis in the first place).
But there is some disagreement over this and fears that Act’s strident opposition to the scheme is bleeding National votes, particularly in Auckland.
In fact, there’s broad disagreement in caucus at how to handle Act in general. This is to be expected. Unlike the established Labour-Green relationship, Act’s relatively recent revival has meant there’s no playbook for National on how to handle having a powerful party to National’s right. Do you compete for votes, or let them pivot right so you can go left?
This isn’t smoke pointing to a spill. But it’s the dry timber that could spark that smoke if Luxon can’t regain a strong polling lead.
Over the last fortnight he has regained the initiative. Hipkins’ floundering on crime in Hawke’s Bay and Question Time stuff-up over the level of taxation in the economy has proved he’s fallible - and beatable.
But it won’t be an easy ride.
Luxon needs this weekend’s policy launch to sing, and start scoring some wins in Parliament in the coming week.
The political winds are blowing in his direction. Disaster response tends to favour the incumbent, but Gabrielle will make inflation worse and harder to fight. The economic headwinds blowing against the Government are strong: high inflation, unemployment, and recession - New Zealand is likely to experience all three this year. You could hardly find a better backdrop for an Opposition leader.
It’s close - close enough to taste.
Luxon’s McKinsey brain parses time in quarters.
The last quarter he’s been justifiably invisible.
There are just two more before the election. He needs to find fuel - and quickly.
Expectations tempered around return to surplus in 2027/28.