NZ’s CEO Christopher Luxon should double down on being Prime Manager - Heather du Plessis-Allan

OPINION

NZ’s CEO Christopher Luxon was on a roll this week.

He put out his second quarterly “Action Plan for New Zealand”. It was a list of 36 “action points” he expects his team of ministers to deliver by June 30.

He got some grief for it.

It was full of easy wins. It’s really not that hard to “take decisions”. That accounted for more than a third of the action points.

It’s hard to measure Action Point 18′s pledge to “raise the energy” New Zealand brings to key international relationships.

It would be a massive fail if his Finance Minister didn’t deliver on Action Point 1, “deliver a budget”.

But Luxon didn’t let the critics dissuade him.

His approach is deliberate.

He’s intentionally, he said on the radio, taking a big decision and “chunking it down”. Once that smaller decision is taken, it means he can “ladder up” to the bigger one. That is called, I gather, going “through the gates of implementation”.

Luxon is already famous for loving a bit of corporate jargon, but this week he gave us an especially big double-helping of it.

Labour and the Greens hated it. A country is not a company, they wailed, and a Prime Minister is not a CEO.

But the more they protested, the more they reminded voters that our current Prime Minister was a CEO, which actually doesn’t feel like a particularly bad skill set to have right now given that we’re in a double-dip recession and so short on money we’re having to fire public servants.

Frankly, this corporate stuff is working for Luxon. If I was him I’d ignore absolutely everybody - friends and critics alike - and double-down on being the Prime Manager of New Zealand.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon didn’t let the critics dissuade him. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Sure, the quarterly plans will start to wear thin if they’re too packed with easy wins and don’t get around to “delivering the deliverables” (Luxon actually said that phrase once). And sure, there are plenty of people who will have no idea what “chunking it down” means given that we learned from Jacinda Ardern there are some voters who need to be talked to like preschoolers.

But every time Luxon rolls out a sometimes-incomprehensible corporate phrase it reminds us that he’s the business guy. That’s his biggest point of difference with the big-spending-money-ain’t-no-thing previous Labour government and he should drive home as much as possible.

I feel obliged to point out I am in a minority with this view. Bar two people, almost everyone I know disagrees with me.

Someone who is an expert in this stuff told me in no uncertain terms this week that I’m wrong and the corporate jargon doesn’t work because people can’t understand it and, case in point, John Key didn’t talk like that and look at how popular he was. But Luxon isn’t John Key. And he will probably never be that popular.

Luxon is sitting on a popularity rating of 25 per cent. That’s a shocker.

With a rating like that this early in his term, there’s a good chance he’ll actually never be loved. But he can still be respected, most likely for knowing what he’s doing with finances.

Of course, his strongest asset is also his greatest risk. CEO are not famous for their empathy. They’re famous for being ruthless.

If the public mood changes on any of the tough decisions being taken - the public service cuts, the crackdown on unruly state house tenants, the lifting of expectations of beneficiaries - he could go from the guy who knows money to the guy who doesn’t care about people.

It’s a risk. The Opposition knows it. That’s why they’ve started the company vs country narrative.

But frankly this is who Luxon is. It’s about the only thing he’s got. It’s also not as if he’s going to charm us into voting for him.

If he’s not going to be loved for being a Prime Minister - and I don’t think he is - he may as well be respected for being a Prime Manager.