Jacinda Ardern isn’t the only New Zealand political leader to be at the podium abroad in recent hours. Last night opposition leader Christopher Luxon appeared at the rightwing thinktank Policy Exchange in London, just a short walk down Horse Guards Road from Downing Street, where the postbox was piling high with resignation letters and demands for Boris Johnson to quit.

“It’s been an interesting day to arrive in the UK, I’ve got to be honest with you,” said Luxon, but he otherwise avoided the subject of Conservative bloodletting, framing his speech in terms that Ardern would broadly agree with: a call for rules-based and open global trade, urging nations to resist protectionist urges. Leaders should not “learn the wrong lessons” from the pandemic, he said.

Luxon, who travelled to Singapore and Ireland before arriving in London, said he was focused on New Zealand’s “productivity disease” – an ailment he diagnosed as long ago as 2018, when he was CEO of Air New Zealand – and laid out National’s plan to turn it around. He also trumpeted the social investment approach conceived by Bill English and described housing in New Zealand as “an abject failure that has been building, to be fair, under successive governments”.

In the Q&A, Luxon raised concern about the added costs being “passed on to business”, pointing to “national income insurance coming at us, things like national awards coming at us … extending sick leave, minimum wages, more public holidays”.

It was a “government that has no people in it with any business experience and it gets thrown over the fence and actually those costs get passed on to businesses”.

The challenge was “unleashing enterprise”, he said, “because we’ve kind of got into a place where the public look to the government for all their answers, but now businesses are getting soft and looking to the government for all their answers, too, when in fact we want to have that entrepreneurship and that enterprise to be unleashed.”

This post was originally published within Live Updates.