Matthew Hooton has over 30 years’ experience in political and corporate communications and strategy for clients in Australasia, Asia, Europe and North America, including the National and Act parties, the Mayor of Auckland.
OPINION
Business leaders and Herald premium subscribers were privileged yesterday to hear from thewomen who should be Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition today.
Yesterday’s Mood of the Boardroom breakfast was arguably the best in the 22 years since NZME’s Head of Business Fran O’Sullivan founded the annual survey, leading the project ever since.
That was partly because Finance Minister Nicola Willis and Labour Finance Spokesperson Barbara Edmonds were evenly matched, with the former holding the advantage of office and the latter being a genuine expert, including as a tax-policy adviser to former Key-era Revenue Ministers Michael Woodhouse and Judith Collins.
Since stepping into the shoes of Sir Walter Nash, Sir Roger Douglas and Sir Michael Cullen, Edmonds has been spending at least as much time meeting with Auckland business leaders as in her Mana electorate in Wellington.
Business NZ’s new chief executive Katherine Rich, a former National MP, told Edmonds that the business community supports her efforts to engage so widely and genuinely as she leads Labour’s economic policy review.
For her part, Willis is fully at home in Auckland business circles having lived here for six years when a Fonterra executive, for two years boarding at King’s College in the 6th and 7th forms, and as a staffer for Sir John Key in the 2010s.
At least as important for yesterday’s success was Willis and Edmonds’ preparedness to engage respectfully with one another and the audience on the long-term issues that are usually lost in the era of social-media politics.
Both agreed being mothers to a combined 12 children demands they take the long term especially seriously.
In tune with the audience, Key-era Commerce and SOE Minister Simon Power, now chief executive of Fisher Funds, thanked them for not using sound bites but instead talking substantively – something the mischievous could interpret as a dig against Christopher Luxon and Chris Hipkins.
Neither incumbent enjoys overwhelming love from business leaders.
Luxon would barely make it into his own kitchen Cabinet if business leaders had their way, ranked sixth behind Willis, Education Minister Erica Stanford, Transport Minister Simeon Brown, Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop and Defence Minister Judith Collins, and on a par with Foreign Minister Winston Peters.
Business leaders see him as capable at checking up on his ministers’ KPIs and as a cheerleader abroad, but not at meeting his own KPIs of providing the political leadership and sense of direction required of any Prime Minister.
The survey numbers suggest he might make a good Chief of Staff or Trade Minister, but is not so well-suited to national leadership at a time when multiple long-term crises demand extremely uncomfortable national conversations and decisions.
Hipkins’ numbers are so terrible it would be unkind to repeat them. He should seek employment outside politics. As Prime Minister, he may have put much of Dame Jacinda Ardern’s legacy to the fire but failed to offer anything from the ashes. When his Finance Minister Grant Robertson and Revenue Minister David Parker offered him a genuinely innovative tax package reflecting Labour values, he chickened out, assuming New Zealand voters couldn’t cope.
In fact, as Power also argued in his thank-you remarks, New Zealand voters have for decades proven capable of understanding and accepting the need for significant change when political leaders engage with them honestly, seriously, clearly and inspirationally.
Even the median voter is not quite the unthinking mutant National and Labour political strategists assume.
Chris Hipkins and Christopher Luxon. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Neither Luxon nor Hipkins seems up to the leadership required. Hipkins’ record speaks for itself. Hopefully, Luxon provided more strategic leadership at Air New Zealand than the risible lists of bureaucrat processes he calls his quarterly action plans, but his leaving the national airline with the worst premium offering of any major carrier servicing New Zealand isn’t encouraging.
One finance-sector chief executive put it beautifully, that National may have mastered the science of politics – as its polling machine and Topham Guerin’s world-leading social-media work confirm – but must now master the art of politics, focusing not just on how to win and retain office, but on using its pulpit and power to deliver necessary reform.
A growing criticism of Luxon among business leaders is the glib and even abusive way he responds to suggestions that conflict with his pre-programmed script, such as his reflexive, unintelligent and bitchy attack on ANZ chief executive Antonia Watson when she discussed the possible macroeconomic merits of a capital gains tax (CGT).
In fact, a CGT is now mainstream policy among business leaders, with 77% in favour according to the Mood of the Boardroom survey.
That number might be a legacy of Cullen’s Tax Working Group, which made a powerful and considered case for the tax, but which Ardern ruled out no less cynically than Luxon.
Willis has no choice but to back Luxon’s position, but did so yesterday by pointing to the technical difficulties of implementing a CGT, rightly arguing that exempting the family home would distort investment towards owner-occupied residential property even worse than the current regime.
She might have left it there, because Edmonds, a tax lawyer, then schooled the Finance Minister on the finer detail of the Income Tax Act. Still, Willis not mindlessly ruling out a CGT on ideological grounds contrasted starkly with Luxon’s boorishness towards Watson.
Similarly, Edmonds may have surprised her colleagues by indicating a willingness to work with Willis on long-term changes to superannuation, to help ward off the post-2030 fiscal calamity that was a major theme of her opening remarks.
The two leaders-in-waiting revealed talks are under way between Edmonds and Bishop on establishing a long-term bipartisan infrastructure pipeline, something 95% of business leaders told the Herald is essential.
For that to work, each side will need to accept the pipeline will include projects they don’t like and exclude some they do, otherwise, it’s just one party having its way over the other. Business leaders say energy generation must be the top priority.
Neither Willis nor Edmonds may ever lead their parties. Willis may be too liberal for National’s social-conservative wing. Edmonds’ admiration for Cullen’s fiscal conservatism won’t sit well with Labour’s far-left, led by former Transport Minister Michael Wood, which is busily taking control of the party’s Auckland regional structure and national policy-making apparatus.
Nevertheless, a bit more of yesterday’s seriousness and a bit less sloganeering is not to be sniffed at. Maybe it will catch on. In which case, the long 17-year era of smile-and-wave and emote-and-hug politics will finally draw to an end, and the long-term social, productivity and fiscal crises will begin to be seriously addressed.
