Thomas Coughlan: Why Christopher Luxon’s Iran war stance will make his campaign even more difficult

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon (left) and Foreign Minister Winston Peters. Photos / NZME

THE FACTS

• Emails published in the Herald show staff in Winston Peters’ office reacting to a request from the Prime Minister to give “explicit public support” to the US-led war in Iran.
• The Prime Minister said the emails “mischaracterise” his position but would not provide evidence to support this contention.
• The release of the emails without consultation prompted Luxon to visit Peters’ office on Wednesday night to give him a dressing down.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon doesn’t have an easy pathway to victory at this year’s election.

And that pathway only became more fraught this week with revelations, first published in the Herald, that the Prime Minister had sought to give more “explicit public support” for the US-led war against Iran.

Luxon said the emails mischaracterise his position, but he has refused to release correspondence to prove this claim.

The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC) was also asked to clarify whether correspondence from its staff backed up Winston Peters’ staff’s characterisation.

Twenty-four hours later, nearly a day after deadline, a spokesperson came back with a terse “DPMC has no comment to make” and said it stood by its Official Information Act response.

The statement’s brevity contrasted sharply with the length of time it took to draft (it works out at about one character every 14 minutes – David Seymour’s effort to improve public sector productivity clearly hasn’t made itself felt in public sector communications departments).

The war has derailed the coalition’s election plan.

It should have been fighting for re-election against the backdrop of hard-won economic recovery, potentially turning its narrow lead over the left bloc into a larger and more stable one.

Now, the coalition occasionally polls behind the left bloc, and senior ministers are using the time they’d planned to spend on attacking Labour and praising the recovering economy, explaining why everything that’s going wrong is the fault of the war and not Luxon himself.

That’s not untrue.

Foreign Minister Winston Peters. Photo / Mark Mitchell

A small number of economists disagree, but a large number believed some form of economic recovery was underway earlier this year.

However, that has been blown apart by the Iran war, which has hiked inflation, dampened growth, and shredded consumer and business confidence.

Thanks to the war, time the Government would have spent trumpeting its own magnificence and attacking Labour is now spent responding to the economic shocks of the war – and explaining why the very negative economic effects are not its fault (Finance Minister Nicola Willis’s seminar last week on Treasury economic forecasts was a masterclass of the form).

But this has all been undermined by Luxon’s personal support for the war in its early days.

National MPs now know that every time they try to blame something on the war, everyone from Labour to New Zealand First will unhelpfully remind voters that this horrible, damaging war was initially supported by their own leader.

Explaining away the pain caused by the war was challenging enough as it is; Labour struggled in the aftermath of the full Russia-Ukraine war, and it had a vastly more popular leader in Dame Jacinda Ardern.

But now, knowing Luxon supported the war at its outset, makes explaining the war’s effects close to impossible.

Labour has already begun running ads which headline the latest bad news from the conflict (on Friday it was news oil prices will stay high for months) with text reminding voters that Luxon wanted to support the strikes.

Expect plenty more of them.

National MPs face the double dilemma of having to explain why things are so bad – and why their leader wanted to give his backing to the conflict that lies at the source of all this misery.

Small wonder, then, that none of the National ministers canvassed by the Herald lent their support to Luxon’s position on the war on Thursday – all did, however, back Luxon himself.

An uncharitable (and metaphor mixing) reading of this jostling is ministers are trying to get close enough to Luxon to snatch the Crown, but not so close that they go down with his sinking ship.

Luxon played the episode as well as he could have.

His extraordinary march down to Peters’ office on Wednesday night to give him a dressing-down, followed by several extraordinary broadsides from Willis, focused on the fact the release of the emails without proper consultation was a massive betrayal of the coalition agreement.

They’re not wrong that the emails should have been consulted on, a fact Peters himself admitted.

Willis dragged this point out, speaking extensively to this point both before and after Question Time. Other senior National MPs did the same.

Finance Minister Nicola Willis joined the attack. Photo / Mark Mitchell

This meant that a considerable amount of time on Thursday was not spent arguing the pros and cons of Luxon’s position on the war, but litigating whether the coalition was about to fall apart.

That’s not a terrible issue for Willis (and Luxon) to talk about.

It gives them an option to suggest that yes, Peters is being rather disputatious at present, and yes, you may conclude from this that Peters is growing tired of National and may decide to go with Labour after the next election.

They know this is Peters’ weak spot.

NZ First has carried many voters during its three decades’ existence, but there’s good reason to believe that its current supporters are very right of centre and have a particular disdain for the last Labour Government led by Ardern.

Peters clearly hates National reminding his supporters of the fact that he brought this Government to power.

This smokescreen worked for Thursday.

The news of the day was as much the fact the coalition partners were squabbling as it was the fact Luxon contemplated shifting the Government’s position to back the war.

How long can that last, however?

Once the smoke clears, the war will still sit at the centre of the Government’s problems, a meta-crisis, dominating everything else, and the National Party part of the Government will need to have something to say.

Former National minister Chris Finlayson backed National’s aggression towards its minor coalition partner and told RNZ it was time for the party to “declare war on New Zealand First”.

Willis, responding a few hours later on Newstalk ZB, said she wasn’t at war with the party and distanced herself from the strategy. Her actions, particularly her broadside against Shane Jones in the General Debate this week, suggest otherwise.

It’s not currently clear this strategy is working for National, although we haven’t had too many polls since Luxon and Willis trained their sights on Peters, this sort of inter-Government warfare can damage the major partner while bolstering the smaller one.

Peters seems not to care.

As we discovered this week, he’s already taught Luxon one lesson on the futility of asymmetric warfare.

Come November, he may teach Luxon another.