We fired up the AI chatbot to assess the prime minister’s comments in response to what he called a ‘negative view’ question.

When the prime minister saw the way his “fireside chat” at the Rotorua Business Chamber on Friday morning had been written up, he was clearly dismayed. 

It was reported that he had taken exception to a question from the Business Chamber’s CEO, Melanie Short, that contained a “negative view”. He was said to have spoken of the “parent-child mentality” he observed in New Zealand government-business relations on his return from the US, where he’d worked at Unilever “building a kick-ass company” and eschewed any thought of seeking government support.

It sounded a lot like a reprise of a theme Luxon had explored in remarks before the last election, when he suggested “businesses are getting soft and looking to the government for all their answers”, or when he sighed that New Zealand had “become a very wet, whiny and inward-looking country”. 

But the prime minister felt the weekend coverage, and criticisms from Labour, had “mischaracterised” his comments. To help clear things up and provide greater context, his office issued a transcript of the exchange. 

That did nothing, however, to quell the criticisms, which included commentary pointing to his own business background, questioning the viability of his leadership and drawing comparisons to David Brent.

The transcript did, however, include a passage in which Luxon digressed into an exhortation of artificial intelligence. “OK, so in this chamber, how many of you are actually using Claude or Claude Code?” he said. As many raised their hands, he continued, “OK, great. How many sessions has the chamber run to help you understand that? Is that your number one focus right here, right now? Because that is going to disrupt your businesses, and it’s a huge opportunity for you to do exceptionally well off the back of it.”

Accordingly, we fired up Claude and provided it with the transcript issued by Luxon’s office (printed in full at the foot of this post), tasking the AI chatbot as follows: 

“I’m going to give you a short exchange between a business leader in New Zealand and a New Zealand politician. They were speaking before an audience of provincial SME [small and medium-sized enterprise] businesspeople. Without looking at any news reports can you offer an assessment of the politician’s communication style and its effectiveness – give me no more than 150 words.”

Claude had a good long think about if for 11 or 12 seconds, before producing the following analysis:

“He’s answering a concrete, anxious question – rising costs, fewer customers, “how long can we hang on” – with an abstract reframe. The moderator names a survival problem; he redirects to a mindset problem. That’s a mismatch that will read as dismissive to people actually worried about cashflow.

“The ‘negative view’ opener is risky: it puts him in the position of correcting a struggling business owner’s framing before addressing their concern, which can come off as lecturing rather than listening.

“His personal narrative (Chicago CEO, ‘who cares what government thinks’) is a coherent political philosophy, but deployed here it functions as deflection – it explains his own worldview rather than answering what he’ll do about costs.

“The pivot to AI/Claude adoption is a topic change dressed as an answer.

“Net effect: confident, ideologically consistent, but empathetically thin. Good conviction, poor listening.”

Perhaps Luxon followed his own advice and took the opportunity to log on to Claude. By yesterday afternoon, in his postcabinet press conference, the prime minister had binned the “mischaracterisation” line and decided instead to apologise, accepting his comments “did not properly acknowledge the challenges that many small business owners are facing”.

The transcript of the exchange issued by Luxon’s office

Moderator: So when I listen to you talk about the way that you were running the country, that’s really relatable because that’s how we run our businesses… 

Prime Minister: Well, that’s exactly the point. 

Moderator: And the, and the challenge now is that we are taking on some extra costs. We do not want to pass them on because we’re also getting less customers through the door. So it’s a matter of time. How long can we hang on? 

Prime Minister: I think that’s a negative view, to be honest. Like we’re entrepreneurs and business people, and I get it. You know, if you’re not retooling and radically disrupting your business, you ain’t doing the job. 

You know, you have to disrupt yourself aggressively before you get disrupted by global events, and if you keep thinking you want the same business model, the same customer mix, the same margin structure, you know you’ve got to be retooling and refinancing and rehoming, and that’s just the reality of business people all around the world. 

So, my job is to make sure I’m setting up the conditions for you to be able to go create that growth. And I think some of the subtext and assumption in your question is that… I think in New Zealand I’ll be honest with you as a business person who was… I sat in Illinois for six years in Chicago, and the last person I wanted to ever talk to as a CEO was the government. 

I didn’t sit there in Chicago saying, I wonder what the government thinks and I wonder what they’re doing to help me for my business? Can I get some grant money to do something? No, no, I’m a business person. 

I’m building a kick-ass company that actually has commercially superior returns, great customer experience, and awesome internal culture. That is the job of what makes a great company, not a good one, a great one. And so that was my mentality. 

Come home to New Zealand, and there’s a parent-child mentality. I have literally sat in boardrooms across New Zealand, and the conversation goes: I wonder what the government’s going to do. I wonder what the government’s going to think. 

Who cares what the government thinks or does? Our job is to be adult, adult, adult. The business leaders, the political leaders, and the community leaders working together, doing things differently. 

I set up the operating system. You go out there and smack it and go create the road, and the community leaders see the pain, the hurt, the need, and the frustration, and the three actors do different things but complementary things to deal with the challenges and the opportunities. 

So I still think there’s a little bit of….OK, so in this chamber, how many of you are actually using Claude or Claude Code? OK, great. How many sessions has the chamber run to help you understand that? Is that your number one focus right here, right now? Because that is going to disrupt your businesses, and it’s a huge opportunity for you to do exceptionally well off the back of it. So how do we collectively lift our SME literacy on something like AI as a result? 

So I’m just pushing back to say my job is to set the conditions up. We’re getting spending under control. We’re getting inflation back into the band. We’re at 2.9% strip out the fuel pieces. We’ve got growth coming in. And that creates opportunity.