In his first check-in with Hosking and Campbell since the challenge to his leadership, prime minister Christopher Luxon admitted he’d made some errors.
“I had a lot on in the week,” Christopher Luxon told Newstalk ZB’s Mike Hosking at 7.40am this morning. It was the first of two interviews in the prime minister’s usual Monday morning media round, and Luxon began by saying what a nice time he’d had on Friday night, hanging out with all the “legends” at Newstalk ZB’s 100-year celebration. Hosking was impressed that Luxon had shown up on Friday, given the hectic week that saw him yank his entire caucus back to Wellington for a leadership challenge that nobody had called for apart from Chris Penk.
Luxon was as upbeat as ever when Hosking asked if he really believed ministers Erica Stanford and Chris Bishop had nothing to do with the sort-of-almost coup. “When they reassure me, that’s good enough for me,” he confirmed. The whole kerfuffle was down to Penk, Luxon added, explaining that he’d had a “really positive conversation” with him when he sacked him as a minister. Did you ask him why he did it, Hosking wondered? “No, I didn’t,” replied Luxon.
Ensconced in the warm embrace of the ZB studio and probably still thinking about positive conversations, Luxon began to open up. He’d made mistakes, he admitted, like not expressing himself better in Rotorua. He needed to get better at communicating. “Without being a psychiatrist or psychologist, in the room on Friday, people loved you,” Hosking told him. “You’re a good guy, gave a great speech. Quite a lot of people turned around to me and said, ‘Why don’t we see more of that?’”
That’s who he is, Luxon said, and if you see him on podcasts talking about himself, you’ll see it too. His biggest struggle, he reckoned, is with the political media format. “You’ve got to land a three-to-six-second soundbite, get the content right, convey some personality, provide some context for a decision – that’s hard.” While Dr Hosking said he didn’t want to overtly come to Luxon’s defence, he couldn’t help himself. “It’s hardly a crime, what you’ve done,” he suggested, adding that “the Opportunity Party are insane – why wouldn’t you rule them out?”
Absolutely, Luxon chuckled. “As a leader, you’ve got to admit, look, I’m grossly imperfect. Under pressure, we all make mistakes.” Then, after eight-and-a-half minutes of mid-to-surface level self-reflection, Luxon switched to policy and admitted that he hadn’t yet seen the specifics of Act’s proposals to reform the public service. Isn’t that what the government was already going to do, Hosking asked?
Luxon was back on comfy ground. The biggest slice of the prize is that we’re spinning our wheels, he explained. You don’t want to boil the ocean and not deliver anything and it’s quite interesting because he’s been to a lot of presidential libraries in the United States and basically it all boils down (probably in the ocean) to a legacy of three or four big things. We were under a rock and now the world knows we want to do business and that’s creating optionality, so just wait until day two of the second term when we retool the public service and simplify our slate. Have a good week, Mike!
Minutes later, Luxon was on the blower to the RNZ studio, asking Morning Report host John Campbell about his weekend. One day, Campbell will tell the PM that he had a really shitty weekend because a pipe burst at his house or something, but today was not that day. “How was yours? That was a brutal old week,” Campbell said, to which Luxon agreed and said it was good to get it all resolved. “Is it resolved?” Campbell pressed. Luxon agreed again.
Campbell wanted to know about the personal impact on Luxon of having two confidence votes in four months, but Luxon stuck to the points he’d made earlier on ZB about National’s “civil war” between 2017-2021, where there were five party leaders in five years. When there’s unrest, he said, we’ve gotta get in that room and have honest conversations. “What do you know now, after two attempts at your leadership?” Campbell inquired, wanting to go deeper. Luxon paused, before asking, “What do you mean?” He admitted that he could have done things differently, referring again to the people who “misunderstood” what he said in Rotorua, and said he’d built a good team. This led Campbell to Stanford, who had 15 opportunities during Tuesday’s Wellington airport walk to express her support for Luxon. He put it to the PM: was her silence an act of will?
Luxon reckoned Campbell was making a lot of assumptions and he had no doubt of Stanford’s support, even though he hadn’t asked Stanford why she didn’t support him in the airport that time (she finally expressed support for Luxon yesterday, back at the airport). Luxon stumbled over his words, frustrated at Campbell’s continued line of questioning about whether Penk really was working for himself. “What was the vote? If he was working for himself, there would have been only one vote against you,” Campbell suggested. “Wouldn’t it be important to know how much support you have in caucus?”
“I have the full support of my caucus,” reiterated Luxon, adding that the best way of tackling unrest was to front up and deal with it. Campbell asked if the government used a similar approach with last week’s changes to fast track legislation, after several councils told the government that “this law sucks”. As the pips for the eight o’clock news began to play and the oceans continued to boil, Luxon hit back with his own claim of suckiness, saying that this legislation was needed in a country that has been “abysmally slow and hopeless” at getting things done. Sorry team, we’ve had a lot on.
