The smell of the election is in the air as National's leader meets the people, writes David Fisher. Photo / Jason Oxenham
OPINION
Christopher Luxon was in Kerikeri doing election exercises today, gathering material and building muscle memory to avoid becoming fresh meat in the upcoming election campaign.
All the signs were there - repetition of trusted talking points, trying out new lines that perhaps worked with focus groups to see how they flew with real people, gathering visual content to sell his leadership to the electorate.
Actually, the sign was literally there. At the entrance to the Kerikeri Sports Complex, it read: “This public meeting is being filmed. By entering this room you consent to being filmed which may be used in advertisements on all National Party channel(s).”
The election is just around the corner. It is still the calm before the storm but the smell of it was in the air. We’re just days away from July and halfway through the month the campaign proper gets underway and Luxon’s shadow-boxing and candidate muscle-building will be tested.
At the afternoon meeting, Luxon was greeted by marginally higher number of people than Simon Bridges in his 2018 outing to Kerikeri - and many more than Judith Collins in 2021.
In total, there were about 170 party faithful gathered to greet him. They did so with applause perhaps less rapturous than that which greeted raconteur Bridges or demagogue Collins, yet with an intent that seemed more earnest.
Kerikeri is not a hard sell for the National Party, but people seemed pleased to see Luxon in a way that outshone the welcome extended to previous leaders on recent visits.
In politics, it’s all about timing, and New Zealand is out of managing Covid-19 and fresh into an anxiety-ridden time in which the cost of living is getting harder to cope with - and public services seem under greater stress - than in decades.
It means Luxon has a near-even chance, if the polls are to be believed, of being Prime Minister in October.
It’s clear the first-term MP is not comfortably fluent in politics yet. On Kerikeri’s high street during a perfunctory walkabout that seemed more about gathering footage than meeting people, Luxon came across a superb local example to illustrate the woes of the health system in the form of publican Gaye Maurice.
Maurice spent four years on a waiting list for foot surgery to deal with crippling pain brought on by osteoarthritis. It took two years to see a specialist and two years to get the operation.
In that time, she worked 16 hours a day, with most of that time spent on her feet. Pain was a constant companion. “Sometimes you just felt the tears coming,” she said. “I just learned to put up with it.”
Just an hour or so later, Luxon was standing in front of the crowd talking about waiting lists. A natural politician would have wrapped Maurice’s story into his pitch to local voters, telling those gathered about the travails of one of their own.
It would have been pitched to a local audience as evidence, in their own neighbourhood, of problems an incoming National Government could solve.
Instead, it was a story that no doubt made an impression on him but otherwise went to waste politically.
It perhaps captures Luxon’s problem. He has brought the National Party from a dire position where it polled in the 20s but it has yet to punch through to the 40s.
Listening to him address the Kerikeri crowd, it was in the manner of a chief executive at an AGM. It was calm, moderate, sensible. He didn’t excite anyone but no one was scared away.
Luxon spoke capably and calmly about the economy, law and order, health and education. He made a couple of self-deprecating jokes, served up a good stump speech which excited only a couple of spontaneous outbursts of applause, and managed the Q&A session with assurance and pledges that he was the balm to the country’s multitude of ills.
The message he kept coming back to, again and again, was that the current Government was broken and National would “get NZ back on track” - the name of his pre-election tour.
It’s a solid message, and one endorsed by every ministerial calamity in Wellington. And yet, it’s a message that hasn’t quite found the traction to take National beyond its traditional voting groups.
And that, perhaps, is because it aims to speak to everyone but doesn’t connect to anyone on an individual and personal level. When quizzed about why he hadn’t told Gaye Maurice’s story at the meeting, he said he had plenty of similar stories, which he surely does.
But Gaye Maurice’s story was a story about one of their people, in their town, experiencing problems with which they were no doubt familiar with a hospital they knew. There was a special connection there to be made and it was an opportunity lost.
In an assessment that is potentially career-limiting, Northland candidate Grant McCallum’s time on the microphone revealed a knack for a personal connection and the sort of political spontaneity that belongs to the brave and the bold. He is challenging Labour’s Willow Jean Prime, now a Cabinet minister and a Labour star in ascendance.
Her capture of the seat in the 2020 “red tide” was the first time since 1938 it had gone Labour’s way. In taking the seat she knocked off National’s Matt King, who has since set up the conspiracy-courting Democracy NZ.
McCallum cracked jokes, spoke with a familiar sincerity to a home crowd and quickly shouted out to a couple of familiar faces he spotted entering the meeting.
He met Jarn and Petra Bracken when they turned up at his Maungaturoto dairy farm 15 years ago looking for work. As is his inclination, he gave them a shot to prove themselves and they did so repeatedly.
Since then, they have worked across the country and learned the trade of dairy farming while raising nine children. Now they live in Kaeo, 20 minutes north of Kerikeri, where they own their own home while farming at Matauri Bay.
They embody the National Party ethos of hard work reaping rewards.
After the meeting, they came across to say hello to McCallum, who introduced them to Luxon. It was a meeting that excited the video team greatly, seemingly more than the encounters with others he was meeting. A person approached the couple afterwards with a waiver to sign so the footage could be used for marketing.
Jarn Bracken said later: “Grant gave us the kickstart.” Petra Bracken said she had wanted to ask Luxon what National would do for Māori in Northland, where about 40 per cent of the population identify as Māori, but the opportunity passed her by.
While her vote was generally applied through a te ao Māori lens, she said that with McCallum “you couldn’t have a better person in the job”.
“I don’t doubt him for a minute. He’s a genuine, honest, fair person. And that’s from our personal experience.”
It was pointed out that they struck a point of difference with the crowd they had moved through to meet Luxon.
And Petra Bracken laughed. “I said that to him,” she said, pointing to her husband. “We are literally the only Māori here.”
David Fisher is based in Northland and has worked as a journalist for more than 30 years, winning multiple journalism awards including being twice named Reporter of the Year and being selected as one of a small number of Wolfson Press Fellows to Wolfson College, Cambridge. He first joined the Herald in 2004.