As Christopher Luxon faced Parliamentary press gallery reporters following his surprise Cabinet reshuffle, he took a question that no Prime Minister should be asked just one year into the job.
With a major poll putting National under 30 percent, the political reporter asked, ‘was Luxon worried that his party might reshuffle him?’
It was only one question towards the end of a half hour press conference, and Luxon shrugged it off with characteristic blather about his optimism for New Zealand, but no one would have put this scenario to his predecessors.
Jacinda Ardern, John Key and Helen Clark were so dominant - and polling so strongly - after a year as prime minister that the question of whether they should have a second and third year simply didn’t arise.
So rather than beginning the year on a steady flight path, the former Air New Zealand CEO starts 2025 with warning lights flashing in the cockpit. A poll result of under 30 percent - National is at 29.6% to Labour’s 30.9% in the latest Taxpayers Union-Curia poll - will be deeply troubling for National.
During three decades of MMP, we’ve seen plenty of minor parties subsumed within coalition governments but not major parties overshadowed by their smaller, coalition partners. That is the inescapable reality for Luxon as Act and New Zealand First dominate the agenda.
Luxon is in danger of sliding into a situation where his leadership is in question. Certainly National wouldn’t want to enter election year 2026 with anything close to a sub-30 poll - even in one survey.
Luxon’s Cabinet reshuffle rightly identified health and the economy as major issues worrying voters.Shane Reti loses the health portfolio and is shunted down the Cabinet rankings and Nicola Willis takes the new portfolio of Minister for Economic Growth.
But the reshuffle has the whiff of a management rejig of the organisational chart with little prospect of altering outcomes. Since 2020 New Zealand has had six health ministers: David Clark, Chris Hipkins, Andrew Little, Ayesha Verall, Shane Reti and now Simeon Brown.
Underneath that there has been massive organisational change with Labour’s dismantling of the DHBs and National’s abolition of the Māori Health Authority. Will a new minister really be the answer to waning confidence in the public health system?
As for Willis becoming Minister for Economic Growth - as the Minister of Finance, shouldn’t she have already been doing that?
The reshuffle also highlights the major problem facing Luxon: David Seymour and Winston Peters are standing in his sunshine.
The reshuffle touches National ministers only - not ministers from Act or New Zealand First. If asked last year whether Reti, or the New Zealand First Associate Health Minister Casey Costello, would face the sack, pundits might have felt safe betting on the latter.
Luxon can shuffle the deck chairs but if polls keep showing National heading towards the iceberg, questions are going to be asked of the captain. He needs to set the political agenda.
That will be difficult as the year begins with a focus on Crown-Māori issues, with the annual Rātana celebrations and Waitangi Day. Luxon won’t attend Waitangi but he can’t hide from the fierce debate about Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill, which has attracted record numbers of public submissions.
Luxon is in a bind. He has allowed the bill to progress and will be blamed for the division it creates. At the same time, having pledged to kill the bill at second reading, he will be left with nowhere to go if his base begins to rally around it.
New Zealand still has a surprising number of people who really do believe that Māori get special privilege, despite every indicator in health, economics, education and justice saying the opposite.
Luxon was never going to be a charismatic leader and in more forgiving times that wouldn’t necessarily be fatal. Jim Bolger did seven years as prime minister and was often considered unspectacular and pedestrian.
But Luxon’s managerial persona is out of kilter with the political zeitgeist.
This is the world of Trump 2.0. The legacy media is in a death spiral. Facts are for sissies. Facebook has killed off its fact checkers and CEO Mark Zuckerburg, in a lengthy chat with podcast king Joe Rogan, said corporates should be doing more to channel “masculine energy” and aggression.
The bros are back. Identity politics is dead. Peak woke is past.
It is Act and New Zealand First who have their sails set to catch the cultural winds blowing in from the US. Luxon is wedged between two populists - both highly skilled politicians.
History says National will win again in 2026. There have only been two one term governments post-war and both were Labour administrations (1957-60 and 1972-75).
But history is broken. Now, fuelled by unhinged social media algorithms, hyper-partisanship and a dystopian outlook, our patience and attention spans aren’t what they were. Incumbents are not cut the slack they used to be.
Hope is not lost for Luxon but he needs to emerge out of the shadow cast by Seymour and Peters and he needs to move fast.
