Shane Te Pou: It's increasingly evident National's Christopher Luxon is not up to the job

Opinion

OPINION:

Christopher Luxon certainly came out swinging on Wednesday morning's AM show when host Ryan Bridge offered the National Party leader the chance to whack the Government over the bumpy rollout of cost of living payments.

Being leader of the Opposition is widely understood as the most thankless job in politics – one that only true political lifers like Phil Goff and Simon Bridges can actually enjoy – but a breakfast television hit like this one should really count as something of a walk in the park for anyone who does politics for a living.

But yet again, Luxon stumbled, just as he did in earlier outings with Tova O'Brien, Jack Tame and, as I wrote about in April, Moana Maniapoto.

This time, Bridge was able to interrupt Luxon's somewhat hyperbolic but effective tirade on the Government's ineptitude by asking for clarity around National's plans for health and education spending.

Since deputy leader and finance spokesperson Nicola Willis had called into question Luxon's earlier claims, also during an interview with Bridge, that National would ensure such spending kept pace with inflation, he was – quite reasonably and entirely predictably – being asked who was right.

Once again, as has become his habit, rather than address the question head on, Luxon resorted to talking points, failing to address the crux of the question he was being asked.

In a shorter-form interview, or at a media stand-up, this kind of non-responsive pivot is an effective tactic – so well known that media trainers have a term for it: the "block and bridge".

But, in ways that Luxon's advisers must be scrambling to correct, it's not a technique that works when you have one questioner, and when that questioner has the power to decide how long the interview will go, and on what terms. Pretending not to understand a question in order to answer one you were not asked does not cut it when the interviewer gets as many goes as they want at asking it.

Ryan Bridge quizzed Christopher Luxon on the AM Show. Photo / Newshub

And so Bridge, noting an unmistakable whiff of obfuscation, persisted on the spending question until Luxon had no choice but to relent, offering this response:

"I can tell you for many years it will probably be ahead of inflation, some years it might be behind but over the long run we are going to be increasing health and education consistently each and every year that we are in government. So people shouldn't be concerned about that."

Only by putting a bow on it could Luxon make this quote more of a gift to the Labour Party.

In just five words "some years it might be behind", Luxon has conceded a point that every National Party leader before him has bent over backwards to refute as "scaremongering" – that, if elected, they will slash spending on schools and hospitals.

And he has done this, I might add, in the midst of a full-blown pandemic.

Labour was bound to campaign on how National threatens social services – they always do – but Luxon has injected rocket fuel into those inevitable attacks.

Not for the first time in his tenure, the AM interview offered Luxon an open goal only for him to somehow find the back of his own net.

When I argued in April's column that they may have got it wrong by putting Luxon ahead of Willis, my National Party friends, somewhat understandably, accused me of stirring. He was, after all, still enjoying a generous honeymoon and being heralded in many elite quarters as the PM in waiting.

But when I make the same point to the same people today, there is noticeably less eye-rolling, and a lot more flickers of acknowledgement.

In the months since, the abortion fracas, the Waikiki jaunt, the brittle media performances, have prompted a decline in National's fortunes that no factor other than his increasingly unsteady leadership can explain.

A Curia poll for the Taxpayers Union in July noted a 5.6 per cent drop in support for Luxon as preferred PM, a perilous trajectory for any new Opposition Leader. And just this week, Roy Morgan reported that National fell by 4 points in its most recent survey to 35 per cent, its lowest since January.

Given the stiff economic and public health headwinds facing the Government, National's smarter strategists will see cause for far greater concern than these apparently modest shifts indicate. The party should be soaring in these conditions – and surely would be if Luxon was the leader everyone kept saying he was.

The AM interview prompted me once again to ponder this question: at what point will Luxon's CEO credentials and superficial plausibility give way to the recognition he is just not very good at this?

• Shane Te Pou (Ngāi Tūhoe) is a commentator, blogger and former Labour party activist.