We still don’t have a new government. There’s cautious optimism in National that maybe this will happen next week? Perhaps? Depending on the breaks? There’s uncertainty about some key positions: deputy PM, foreign minister and education are all possible concessions to National’s coalition partners.
We have more clarity about what is unlikely to be conceded. National’s power brokers - the party’s most formidable and influential MPs - have enormous ambitions for their time in government and they will not be inclined to compromise them to indulge the minor parties. Who runs National and what will they do with their newly won - but not quite achieved - political power?
Christopher Luxon
Prime Minister is a strange calling: it’s more like four conflicting and difficult jobs merged into a single impossible role. There’s the ceremonial aspect: the opening of schools, greeting of dignitaries, the speeches at Rātana and in Parliament, the photo-ops, media stunts, awards ceremonies and other public functions. And it’s a governance role, given the PM chairs Cabinet, the cabal of senior government ministers that runs the country - but the PM is also a high-powered press secretary for Cabinet and the rest of government, constantly fronting the media to try to justify the many debacles and misadventures their administration has inflicted on the nation on any given week.
The PM leads the political party, managing relationships with coalition partners and keeping the infighting between their own MPs and factions to a manageable level. On top of that they’re a de facto foreign minister. Jacinda Ardern dazzled the world; Chris Hipkins shuffled around the palaces of the mighty in ill-fitting suits, where he was served sausage rolls and cans of coke. Luxon will presumably find a middle ground between Ardern’s global beacon of hope and Hipkins’ more modest figure.
Luxon’s ambitions for his government are still vague - getting our mojo back was as close as we got to a statement of principles or manifesto. He’s most associated with his time running Air New Zealand but much of his business career was at Unilever, a gigantic multinational consumer goods company. (You probably drink tea made by Unilever or use its soap or shampoo or beauty products or eat its ice cream.) It is sometimes mocked by financial commentators as “the most boring company in the world” but it has a long tradition of steady, competent management. This is roughly how National’s caucus seem to regard their new leader: he’s unlikely to deliver Harvard’s commencement speech or feature on the cover of Vogue but he is good at running things. So far.
Nicola Willis
A former Fonterra executive, Willis was a staffer for Bill English and then John Key during the last National government. Beehive legend has it she played the role of Helen Clark when Key was practising for his leaders’ debate in the 2008 election campaign but launched such a devastating attack that Key’s advisers called an end to the process, worried she’d damage his confidence.
The only portfolio Luxon has guaranteed going into coalition negotiations is that Willis will be his finance minister. She’ll also hold a new portfolio called “social investment” - this is a model of public service delivery developed by English that uses data and analytics to evaluate the performance of public spending. If Willis successfully implements this framework, her dual mandate will make her immensely powerful - a de facto minister of everything who determines what gets spent across all of government but also how and why.
Her success is far from a foregone conclusion. Willis will also have to implement National’s tax package, oversee cuts to public spending and accommodate whatever whims and demands emerge from Act and New Zealand First. And the public service itself will fight a ferocious battle of attrition against any attempt at reform.
Chris Bishop
Another former Beehive staffer, Bishop was a champion student debater and an adviser to Steven Joyce. He captured the Hutt South electorate in 2017 and managed this year’s National campaign.
National was formed back in the 1930s as a coalition between rural conservatives and urban liberals: Bishop and Willis are close allies and co-conspirators and represent the modern-day liberal faction in a caucus increasingly dominated by social conservatives. Bishop will probably take the housing and infrastructure portfolios, managing the government’s 30-year development pipeline while trying to repeal and replace Labour’s Spatial Planning Act and Natural and Built Environment Act, enormous bills that partially replace the Resource Management Act. This will trap Bishop in a prolonged nightmare of negotiations between local councils, iwi, housing providers and the many state organisations with overlapping interests and responsibilities in these sectors.
Shane Reti
Most successful politicians operate on instinct. They’ve seen enough scandals to know how things will play out and they’ve become accustomed to making quick decisions under intense uncertainty and stress.
But politics is Reti’s third career. He was a rural GP in Northland for many years. He won a fellowship to study at Harvard and became a lecturer and researcher at one of its teaching hospitals. He has been in parliament since 2014 and rose to become National’s deputy leader under Judith Collins. While he’s generally regarded as one of the smartest and deepest thinkers in his party - if not the entire parliament - he lacks the reptilian cunning that most senior ministers rely on.
The theory is that Reti’s background in medicine and science will make up for this and help him navigate the treachery of the health portfolio, which is plagued by chronic shortages, dysfunctional bureaucracies and intransigent sector groups. It’s in dire need of reform but has just suffered through extensive reforms.
The problem with this theory is that Labour’s most recent health minister, Ayesha Verrall, was also a conspicuously clever physician and researcher and none of these qualities seemed to make a difference as the system crumbled to pieces around her.
Paul Goldsmith
The only top-ranking member of National’s team with former ministerial experience after serving in the Key-English cabinet. He is National’s long-suffering candidate for Epsom, having faithfully stood aside to allow David Seymour to win the electorate and thus bring a few extra right-wing MPs in through the seat loophole.
Goldsmith is possibly the only remaining member of his party who could be described as “neoliberal”. He literally wrote the book on Don Brash, National’s most ardent champion of free markets and deregulation. It’s no secret that Goldsmith would like to be finance minister - but that spot is very much taken. Instead, he’s likely to become the nation’s fifth justice minister in three years, trying to toughen criminal sentences in the teeth of a judiciary who are increasingly anti-incarceration. Like his colleagues, he’ll spend the next three years trying to reform systems operated by people who disagree with almost everything he believes. These placid weeks before the formation of the government are a brief calm before an enduring storm.
