OPINION:
As did Labour's latest leader before him, the Nats' new broom kept a low profile as he made his ascent.
Already Christopher Luxon has broken the mould – or has at least given it a serious bashing. To take it from National's new leader, he spent the few days up till his election not in the time-honoured leadership-contest frenzy of horse-trading, wheedling and bullying, but in putting the caucus through a sort of family group conference.
He'd concentrated, he said, on "how we break this pattern of behaviour". Like a frustrated parent of delinquents, he ordained no more toys or outings, confiscated the car keys and mandated time out for intensive policy homework. MPs would have to meet his "higher expectations" before he conferred shadow spokesperson-ships, rankings and media opportunities.
If this really is the way things played out, there's a third career for the former business titan in bringing peace to the Middle East. It's a stretch to imagine those gizzard-ripping MPs sitting and taking their lumps like a Stepford caucus, rather than demanding jobs and flattery and finking on one another as usual.
Perhaps reassuringly, before staff had even changed the leader's door nameplate, the supporters of leader-before-last-before-last Simon Bridges had leaked that Luxon had in fact offered him shadow finance and third ranking. This suggests a continuation of business as usual, blue in tooth and claw – but with a proviso that there should be less of it. If there's one thing that unites even caucuses wreathed in spite, it's the sniff of success, and that only comes with a popular leader.
Familiar feel
Luxon's first outing was eerily reminiscent of the day Labour installed Jacinda Ardern. We saw a different version of the first-term MP come out of the blocks – steely and purposeful, embracing the limelight. The new-edition Luxon was relaxed, genial and considerably less wooden than he has appeared until now.
Like Ardern before her rise, he had been carefully keeping his light under a bushel, conscious of the risk of upstaging senior colleagues. More so than Ardern, Luxon was labelled #leaderinwaiting from the outset, and in New Zealand politics, that branding is usually best downplayed.
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.The good news is Luxon has decades of experience building world-beating high-performance teams. The bad news is he has only 32 unsackable MPs to work with, who, in a complex matrix of malevolence, have so far proven only that they can't trust one another.
It's usually instructive to see what history can tell us about tricky current situations. This time, all it tells the Nats is: never get into this sort of fugue in the first place. Unelectability has always looked exactly like this, whichever party's past foundering Opposition caucus you care to name: ley lines of personal animus, leaking, waffly policy and leadership instability.
/cloudfront-ap-southeast-2.images.arcpublishing.com/nzme/YLLTGNAZUYXMH2FFPH6JRQBQPY.jpg)
The one usual ingredient missing is a deep ideological rift – only because the Nats have been too busy to get around to that. Even the widely expected social-conservative versus liberal-progressive turf war has fizzled for lack of commitment.
This caucus seems barely to have even visited its own back yard, neglecting the most basic heartland blue causes, notably hate speech and the police's new "consent" approach. National was late to the party even saying "boo" about the democratic and civil liberties infelicities of the fast-tracked Covid "traffic light" legislation. On the protection of property rights, it has positively turned turtle, being gulled into a hugely self-damaging housing densification accord with Labour.
Labour's Beehive traction has never seemed under threat, despite what should have been an Opposition banquet of policy overreach and missteps.
The collateral damage in all this is to National's heartland voters, who've been left powerless against increasingly heavy state incursions. Setting aside Covid, there are a slew of measures that a viable and menacing Opposition could spook the Government out of. Think of the previous Labour administration's "fart tax" and its proposed hyper-regulation of herbal supplements. Concerted opposition, which National was clearly seen to spearhead, made the Helen Clark Government lose its titanium nerve more than once.
This National team has, for instance, let down the thousands of workers who had every right to hope that the "ute tax" penalty on their indispensable petrol and diesel vehicles would be dropped. The party has lost the helm of the farming sector, leaving the field to the rackety Groundswell protest movement, which in turn has attracted off-message hangers-on such as anti-vaxxers.
Pale blue-green
Another voter allergen has been National's ambivalence on climate change. The ill-fated Todd Muller leadership was due to put climate change, bracketed with protection of agriculture, at the heart of party policy, but with his self-implosion, the party's green thinking was shoved back in the bottom drawer. This is a pivotal point of vote-growth potential on the right, particularly among younger voters. National's unique selling point should be its ability to make New Zealand's adaptations and sacrifices both bearable and proportionate. Labour and the Greens have, for instance, deliberately under-sold the farm sector's massive global sustainability advantage over competitors because it doesn't suit their ideology or aims. National has a clear path to popularity in this policy struggle but has been incoherent. Sure, different MPs pop up to decry the various regulatory impositions on farmers, but the approach has been reactive and piecemeal.
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.It has a thriving blue-green wing doing big-picture thinking on the optimal trade-offs for climate mitigation, but voters have seldom heard any of it.
Clearly aware of all these failings, Luxon signalled an early priority would be to dilute the housing accord. That the Government managed to get Collins into this crocodile roll in the first place remains an embarrassment. That new deputy Nicola Willis has barnacled herself to it, lecturing doubters to "trust the economics", will make the inevitable handbrake turn all the more ungainly.
In what must be the most labyrinthine version ever of "my enemy's enemy is my friend", Luxon vows to deploy both Collins and Bridges as heavy artillery at the front – not that he has a choice. Leaving them underemployed would guarantee more destabilising shenanigans.
Luxon rather winningly apologised for his fondness for country-and-western music, but at least it gives him a rich choice of soundtrack to match his progress or otherwise: from the can-do anthem These Boots Are Made for Walkin' to I Fall to Pieces.
Given his wildly optimistic family-group-conference approach, though, spread-betters had best include D-I-V-O-R-C-E.
