OPINION
Christopher Luxon brings an intensity (a favourite word) to his pursuit of international relationships. A self-confessed extrovert, he is a hugger with a sense of fun that saw him ploughing into Jollibee fried chicken in Manila, later dancing through jostling sticks at the presidential palace and earlier joining a tuk tuk ‘motorcade’ in Bangkok.
Luxon is fast building out his Rolodex, forging strong personal connections with the leaders of three Southeast nations on his first big international foray as Prime Minister.
The hijinks gave a human dimension to the serious work – upgrading international agreements to a more strategic level as part of a foreign policy reset; opening doors for the business delegation accompanying him on his South-East Asian swing and opening the eyes of his officials to the possibilities of a more strategically-focused public service.
Says Luxon: “I do think those relationships matter”.
Having a relationship where there is mutual trust, is important to the Prime Minister.
“You can get into some good conversations … it doesn’t mean you agree on everything, but it means that you can present your view very clearly.”
Smart leaders do all of this.
It’s a trait of successive New Zealand leaders who have built connections early on in their prime ministerships, enabling our small country to have relevance beyond its scale.
Jacinda Ardern is an international phenomenon who struck a political friendship with French Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron which endures through the Christchurch Call and the Paris Peace Forum; and close enough also to hitch a ride with Canada’s Justin Trudeau to a New York engagement after Queen Elizabeth’s funeral.
Sir John Key has his famous connection with Chinese President Xi Jinping – swapping Christmas cards and opening doors for NZ business in Beijing – which endures to this day.
But Key also connected personally with former United States President Barack Obama at golf, and, Queen Elizabeth and other members of the Royal family who hosted the Key family at Balmoral.
It is obvious that Luxon enjoyed himself during the jam-packed mission - which was at times brutal with briefings starting at 6.30-7am each morning and meetings right through the day concluding with dinners or functions each evening.
He was generous with his time, taking part in many CEO briefings and asking questions through a business lens (in a nod to his former career as a FMCG CEO and former boss of Air NZ) overlain with the reality that he is now in a position as prime minister to “make things happen”.
It’s predicted that the $350 billion global space industry could surge to over $1 trillion by 2040.
Peter Beck’s Rocket Lab is a standout; now a US-listed company, it still has operations in Mt Wellington and a launch pad in Mahia.
Luxon relates NZ comes fourth after the US, Russia and China with the most frequent rocket launches.
“That whole thing happened because of Steven Joyce (former National Cabinet Minister) and Peter Beck.”
Space is one of the big bets that Luxon’s Government is placing as it seeks to deliver on a goal to double exports within a decade.
The NZ Government is a partner with mana whenua in Tawhaki Joint Venture, 50km out of Christchurch. It operates a National Aerospace Centre for aerospace and space launches. This is a part of a fast-growing cluster including Dawn Aerospace and the University of Canterbury engineering department.
Allowing Singaporean Unmanned Aerial Vehicles - UAVs or drones - into NZ’s airspace for testing, could be part of that future.
But it’s not limited to defence applications. There are growing commercial applications that NZ can develop involving more counterparts from the Philippines as well as the US and elsewhere.
Luxon was the last political leader to meet Lee Hsien Loong just ahead of the announcement he would step down as Singapore’s Prime Minister on May 15, and the first to meet incoming Prime Minister Lawrence Wong.
It is a generational shift – the first in 20 years.
Luxon relates Lee has been very good to him. He earlier went to Singapore in 2022 as Opposition Leader to study two things the city state excels at: Master planning of infrastructure and public service delivery.
Lee told him then: “I want to have a good relationship with you”.
“He’d been on the job for 20 years. He was inculcated into statecraft, I think, very, very early, very young,” says Luxon.
The Singapore Government connected him with the Centre for Strategic Futures, part of a strategy group in the Prime Minister’s office which has developed its own foresight planning tools to deal with emergent or discontinuous trends. Luxon is a fan.
He also met the head of the public service, and the chairs and CEOs of Temasek – the S$382 billion (NZ$459 billion) investment company which holds stakes in many prime Singaporean companies; the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC) and Port of Singapore.
Singapore is NZ’s fourth largest trading partner with total bilateral trade of $10.3 billion.
NZ and Singapore are strongly connected as global pathfinders for free trade, jointly spearheading the Trans-Pacific Partnership (now CPTPP) which has grown to link 11 Asia-Pacific nations as well as the United Kingdom.
“We’re aligned around very strong defence ties. I mean, we were there for a very long time, and that’s still appreciated,” says Luxon.
Growing NZ’s relevance is key.
Luxon’s ambition is for NZ to be “at the table” and “relevant”.
“I don’t want us to be brushed off as ‘nice but not relevant’,” he says, noting that is a danger as the world gets more complex.
Elevating the Singapore-NZ Enhanced Partnership by the end of 2025 is key. The two PMs also agreed to ensure flows of critical supplies between Singapore and NZ during times of crisis, reflecting shared core interests in building resilient supply chains that protect food and energy security, and wider national security interests.
Co-operation on green economy initiatives, including on energy and transport technology, and finance and investment, including carbon markets, are part of the mix.
Luxon was particularly taken with Singapore’s creative approach to solving problems by developing urban aquaculture - fish farms in six storey buildings.
Luxon recognised a kindred spirit when he met Thailand Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin at an Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Leaders Summit hosted by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese earlier this year. Both are acting as “salesmen” for their countries, hustling investment and business – ‘chief marketing officers’, as one Thai adviser noted.
Both leaders gained their business spurs in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector. Srettha started in Procter and Gamble in Thailand, Luxon in Unilever – the top two FMCG companies in the world.
The Thai PM went on to develop a property company.
“I connected with him over being commercial and being an outsider from politics,” says Luxon.
Thailand is NZ’s 10th largest trading partner – 51 per cent of goods and services exports to Thailand are dairy products. The PMs set a shared goal to triple two-way trade by 2045 and to upgrade the bilateral relationship to a Strategic Partnership by 2026 including plans to reboot tourism.
This is where the nudge comes in.
Strettha openly wants the partnership upgraded earlier than 2026 which will put pressure on officials from both sides to deliver.
Luxon revealed they also want the resumption of direct flights between Bangkok and NZ. Neither Air NZ nor Royal Thai Airways (which is still recovering after it was decimated by the Covid pandemic) have this in their sights. But the strong prime ministerial nudge is there.
It’s no secret that Luxon flew commercial to Melbourne earlier this year for Albanese’s Melbourne soiree.
He didn’t let on to Southeast Asian leaders that the RNZAF’s 757 – dubbed “Old Faithful Betty” – was still on the tarmac in Wellington
“I kept it hidden from Albanese there had been a problem. The first words out of his mouth, might have been: ‘You’ll need a kayak to get home’,” jokes Luxon.
The upshot was that Luxon connected with Philippines president Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Junior over dinner rather than for a formal bilateral.
They had their spouses with them and the connection was so strong that Lisa Marcos invited him to stay at the Malacañang Palace’s presidential guest house which she had just finished redecorating.
“They were very warm and very relational and very extroverted like I am, and Amanda is, and I got on well with both of them. They’re a good fun couple, are quite energetic and I genuinely had a huge affinity for the Philippines from my previous life at Unilever.”
Luxon has been to the Philippines some 30 times putting in place a Unilever Innovation Centre there and developing an affinity for Jollibee fried chicken, which the president later noted on Instagram.
The Philippines is a young country of 110 million with an average age of 25 and one of the fastest growing countries in Southeast Asia. It’s not really been on NZ’s radar for more than a decade.
But NZ and the Philippines will upgrade their relationship to a Comprehensive Partnership by 2026 and have set an ambition to grow trade by 50 per cent by 2030. Security is part of the mix with plans to allow the two defence forces to do more together by the end of this year.
Luxon relates that working in large multinationals like Unilever you have to build relationships.
“That’s what I sort of loved about the job, because it was such a big organisation that you were thinking globally, regionally. locally, you were a large multinational. So you had to think about the political context for each of the countries you’re operating in.
“And you had big levers to push and pull.”
Understanding more deeply the political context in the countries in which NZ does business in is important to him. The Prime Minister believes our firms need to take a more strategic approach so they can gear their endeavours to the national strategies the Southeast Asian nations are pursuing and to grow with them.
It’s a philosophy he is deploying in NZ.
He wants his Cabinet Ministers out talking with their stakeholder communities and out of the wood panelled offices and Wellington cars.
“You can get very busy doing the job in Wellington and getting very caught up in what we’re doing down there. But actually, you’ve got to be available and accessible and open.”
Disclosure: Fran O’Sullivan was a member of the business delegation that accompanied Prime Minister Chris Luxon on his official visit to Southeast Asia.
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