Thomas Coughlan: Christopher Luxon grapples with ghost of Covid response as new crisis looms

Finance Minister Nicola Willis and Associate Energy Minister Shane Jones arriving for their National Fuel Plan Update. Photo / Mark Mitchell

THE FACTS

• The Government announced a new four-phase response to the fuel crisis on Friday.
• The Government has hosted its updates on the crisis in a range of locations in Parliament.
• Prime Minister Christopher Luxon opened Christchurch’s new stadium.

The fuel crisis has many victims, the greatest of which are clearly those who are being killed and maimed in the war overseas.

Closer to home, the greatest victims are the businesses and workers facing unreasonable and impossible cost escalation.

And down the list of victims, admittedly well towards the bottom, are Parliament’s hardworking, accredited visual journalists, the cameramen and women who show up on precinct daily to beam the day’s news to websites, your phones and TV screens.

It’s a high-stakes job; as you may remember from the Covid 1pm press conference, audiences have a low tolerance of poor quality video and audio. That attitude is quite reasonable, if you’re tuning in to a livestream during an emergency you want to be able to hear and see your leaders (for that reason, can I plug the Herald’s Parliamentary livestreams, usually done by Mark Mitchell, a press gallery veteran whose tenure dates back to the Bolger era).

So, if your reserves of pity have not been drained diesel-like by the crisis, pity them. Since the crisis began, they’ve been lugging their heavy gear around Parliament, to ministers’ offices, the Beehive banquet hall and the legislative council chamber, setting up, lighting and, most importantly, checking the audio from these locales to bring the latest on the crisis to your home.

One thing could make their life a little easier, and that would be ministers holding their fuel updates in the Beehive Theatrette, a purpose-built space for ministers to update the public. But ministers are avoiding the theatrette like the plague, which is what they believe many New Zealanders now associate it with.

Many New Zealanders will draw obvious comparisons between this crisis and Covid: the four-stage alert system (now replaced), the insatiable appetite for esoteric data, and that sinking feeling as the days shorten in March that this winter might be worse than usual.

However, the Government is desperate that you think of this crisis differently, and to that end they’re staying well away from what was for two years the pandemic’s proscenium.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Finance Minister Nicola Willis fronting the media this week. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon takes these sorts of visual cues very seriously: one of the last decisions he made before becoming Opposition Leader was to book the Beehive banquet hall for what would be his first press conference as leader. The usual spot in which those press conferences take place, the Legislative Council Chamber, was too associated with years of National Party instability and Luxon wanted a fresh backdrop, signalling a fresh start.

The coalition’s obsession with drawing a line under Covid doesn’t stop there. On Friday, the Government announced a new four-step response to the crisis, replacing alert levels, the terminology used in the prior fuel plan (and, famously, the Covid response), with “phases”, a decision made late Wednesday night when the policy was agreed. When Luxon saw how Covid-coded the alert system was, he intervened personally to change the language.

The parties of the coalition have an almost Freudian relationship to Labour’s Covid response, hating it not just because it trampled their generally free and liberal ideology, but because in the case of National and NZ First, Covid shredded their political fortunes. National’s popularity plunged to a level from which it’s never recovered. But for all that, the Government is also deeply envious of the popularity of the response and the way it imbued Labour with a mandate almost unthinkable now.

Another contrast with Covid is the way in which Luxon is playing only a supporting role in the response, at least in public. He’s been present at only a handful of the ministerial updates on the crisis, and even when he was present, such as Tuesday’s unveiling of the $50 a week increase to the In-Week Tax Credit, it was Finance Minister Nicola Willis who took the lead, answering the bulk of questions and giving most of the detail.

On Friday, when Willis and Associate Energy Minister Shane Jones unveiled the new “phase” system, one of the most significant parts of the emergency response, Luxon was in Christchurch opening a new stadium. Dame Jacinda Ardern would never have been absent for such a significant moment in the response.

Luxon isn’t afraid to delegate. One of his strengths is the fact he trusts his ministers enough not to micromanage them. Willis, for instance, is chairing the ministerial group with delegated authority to manage the crisis. Luxon chimes in for significant decisions, but he seems happy and comfortable for Willis to handle the rest.

Behind the scenes, he’s rewired the public service to take greater personal control of the crisis, rather than have it managed by MBIE, a department which didn’t cover itself in glory this week. He’s delegated DPMC’s Janine Smith, who heads up the Prime Minister’s Policy Advisory Group (PAG), the elite group of public servants whose job is to advise the prime minister on just about anything, to run the response.

Nevertheless, there’s an Ardern-shaped hole in the public facing part of the response, which Luxon seems determined not to fill. The uncharitable view of his near-invisibility would put it down to the fact Luxon is one of the weaker communicators in the Government and could elevate fears as much as assuage them.

A more charitable view is that Luxon’s role is to live the Government’s “keep calm and carry on” message to the country. This fuel crisis is not Covid. Fuel shortages will make life difficult. If they persist and if the diesel shortage becomes acute, they will wipe out many businesses and jobs, but, crucially, they won’t kill you. New Zealanders should be sensible, conserve supplies, try out other transport modes, but there is no reason to panic.

If this were the Covid crisis, for example, it would be dangerous to the point of insanity to encourage people to check out Christchurch’s new stadium, but there’s nothing to stop people getting out and enjoying themselves during an energy crunch (it just might be best to try Christchurch’s well-priced bus service). Our fuel stocks are likely to dip lower than we would like them to, but at the moment neither ministers nor officials are concerned we will run out of anything.

Both of these views are probably true. Luxon is clearly doing less media, a likely tactic to avoid more embarrassment like his famous press conference at the beginning of the war. It’s also true that all the governing parties are keen to do everything to prop up New Zealanders’ confidence in the country and economy.

That’ll be quite an effort. The latest ANZ-Roy Morgan Consumer Confidence numbers show consumer confidence plunging nearly 10 points in March on uncertainty brought about by the conflict. The proportion of households thinking it’s a good time to buy a major household item (the best retail indicator) fell 10 points to -14, back where it was in October.

There’s good reason for a shot of confidence, not least because that consumer sentiment will be necessary to shore up what’s left of the fragile economic recovery.

But there’s also a case for meeting in the middle with the public, who are concerned by the energy shock. One of the things Ardern did well during the first stage of the Covid response was follow and shape public sentiment in equal measure, from mid-February when public concern was low to mid-March when it was getting higher. Tailoring a response to the level of anxiety felt among the public had the benefit of showing the Government was sensitive enough to people’s fears to respond with an adequate and equal policy response.

Prime Minister Dame Jacinda Ardern and director-general of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield made regular appearances during the pandemic. Photo / Mark Mitchell

There are flaws to that approach. The second phase of the Royal Commission was critical of the way the Government struggled to articulate a future without the elimination strategy, which was impossible to maintain forever. In fact, many ministers wanted to try to move to a more future-looking, sustainable response. The problem was us. Elimination was so popular among the public, the Government didn’t have the political courage to try to convince us a different strategy would soon be necessary and weather the political blowback.

This Government doesn’t want to end up in the same command and control style response, simply because public anxiety demands it. It’s not clear how much it could do, even if it did have the appetite. While Covid was a more deadly crisis, it was also something which, through lockdowns and border closures, the Government could actually do something about. There’s little a Government can do to combat inflation shocks. And ministers pretending that they could risks making the Government look impotent when the truth becomes obvious.

Nevertheless, the Government may have overcorrected itself in its pivot from the Covid response.

Luxon’s cheerleader routine flies in the face of public sentiment, which is understandably concerned, and risks making the Government look reckless if the worst were to come to pass. He should try to meet the public halfway. There is a virtue in looking like you understand the public’s anxiety, even if there’s little you can do about it. Empathy is critical. It was a key strength of Ardern’s at this stage of the Covid crisis. This Government is welcome to articulate a new approach, but that approach would look more convincing if the coalition were polling close to where Labour and the Greens were in 2020.

The Government is looking to ramp up the response as time goes on. A move to “Phase 2” of the plan, at least for diesel, seems likely. Ministers are looking at how to address the concerns of care and support workers, who do a lot of driving for work, but whose mileage rates are insufficient to cover fuel costs at current prices.

So far, the Government’s response has been proportionate. Willis and Jones, the public faces of the response, are handling it well. Willis has probably had one of the best months of her ministerial career.

How long that lasts is anyone’s guess. So far, the strategy seems proportionate, but as we’ve all learned this month, things can change quickly.