To be sure, Luxon still pips TPM on favourability, with 31% saying they’re okay with him, compared with just 20% for TPM.
But that’s not much consolation, since Luxon’s numbers are no better than those of Winston Peters and only a point or two ahead of the Green and NZ First parties.
Luxon is well behind both National and Labour, and Chris Hipkins.
Indeed, offered a choice between Luxon and Hipkins for Prime Minister, more people now prefer the Labour leader, a shocking result given his abject failure in education and health in the Ardern Government and briefly as Prime Minister.
Worse, Labour is now seen across multiple polls as better than National at managing the two issues that most concern voters: the cost of living and health.
That’s equally shocking after the damage the Ardern-Hipkins Government did to both with its massive inflationary borrowing, even after defeating Covid, and its expensive and shambolic health reforms.
It’s difficult not to conclude that it is Luxon hurting his party and his Government’s support, and thus economic confidence, rather than them lowering his personal numbers.
This isn’t necessarily Luxon’s fault. As I wrote last week, no one will ever accuse him of being a lucky Prime Minister.
In a different economic and geostrategic context, his slapstick product promotions in Asian markets and goofy social media posts might endear him to voters, like they did for Sir John Key and Dame Jacinda Ardern.
Sadly for Luxon, he never gets a similar break.
Even yesterday’s better-than-expected GDP figures for the March quarter reveal that, when he stood up before the Auckland Business Chamber in late January to declare a renewed focus on “growth, growth, growth”, the economy was then doing quite well.
We now learn that, just as Luxon was asking to be measured on future GDP growth, it was already peaking, having likely slowed through the late autumn and early winter.
There remains very little chance that annual growth this financial year will reach the 0.8% forecast by the Treasury in the Budget, which is needed for Nicola Willis’ numbers to add up.
Since Luxon became Prime Minister, the construction industry has collapsed, down nearly 10% in the past year, largely because of uncertainty over Government infrastructure projects and resource-management reform.
For all the rhetoric from Shane Jones on one side and environmentalists on the other, mining has fallen 11.2% over the past 12 months.
Yields on 10-year government bonds remain higher than the Treasury hoped, increasing Willis’ borrowing costs. No cash or even traditional operating surpluses are forecast this decade.
House prices are stagnant or marginally falling, lowering small and medium-sized enterprises’ confidence to invest, despite the Budget’s welcome new depreciation rules.
Better news is that unemployment may remain below the 5.4% the Treasury feared, lowering welfare costs and supporting revenue. On the other hand, the commodity-led recovery is driving up supermarket prices, preventing that good news from spreading from provincial New Zealand to the middle-class suburbs where elections are decided.
At the same time, global inflation is at risk of re-emerging even as global growth falls sharply. Luxon has taken credit when the Reserve Bank has confirmed cuts to the Official Cash Rate (OCR). What will he do if and when they stop coming?
US President Donald Trump is surely as much to blame for all this as unlucky Luxon, but the Prime Minister’s decision to use Nicola Willis’ hard-won savings for tax cuts and handouts rather than deficit reduction is his responsibility alone.
Luxon denies that, compared with reducing his Government’s borrowing, any and all “cost-of-living relief”, like his $14-a-fortnight extension of Working for Families to 142,000 families last month, will tend to worsen the very inflation he aims to mitigate.
Regardless of whether the cause is domestic or global, any OCR hike over the next 16 months would be politically catastrophic for the coalition. The good news is that, so far, none is forecast.
Poor old Luxon has no better luck in foreign affairs and trade policy. At a time of global crisis, his promised free-trade agreement with India must drop down Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s priority list.
After waiting 18 months, Luxon’s trip to China was meant to be a triumph, but being pictured parading glasses of milk, kiwifruit and potential holidaymakers wasn’t quite the right look as war broke out in the Middle East.
Claiming jobs would be created and that family incomes would rise from Chinese planes landing in Auckland before flying on to South America sounded optimistic at best.
Luxon’s meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing later today might have positioned him more seriously as a statesman, but, as his luck would have it, it now doesn’t merely precede his trip to Nato to talk about confronting the “Crink” alliance of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. Now, even if the Xi meeting goes ahead more than briefly, it risks coinciding with the US attacking China’s good friends in Tehran.
Again, this wouldn’t be Luxon’s fault, but – depending on events overnight – today’s photo-op risks associating him in the eyes of New Zealand’s friends and allies with Xi, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un rather than with Australia’s Anthony Albanese, Canada’s Mark Carney, the UK’s Sir Keir Starmer, Japan’s Shigeru Ishiba, South Korea’s Lee Jae Myung and Nato’s Mark Rutte.
Then, when Luxon gets to Nato, Xi and the Chinese establishment risk slamming him as a stooge of Trump and Nato’s efforts to confront Crink.
Despite the worrying economic numbers, terrifying geopolitical outlook and his own deep unpopularity, Luxon remains safe as National leader, with no one else too keen on the job right now. The polls indicate he remains on track to win a second term, albeit only just.
But that might be his worst luck so far, given a second term is impossible without both Act and NZ First, and that he will almost certainly have a reduced majority, probably of just one or two seats.
That would make Luxon’s second term even more difficult than his first, with every disgruntled National, Act or NZ First backbencher able to bring the whole house down on a whim.
The Prime Minister could be forgiven for wishing he had stayed at Air New Zealand.
