The prime minister continues to make basic communication errors – but a fixation on them risks masking some important truths.
It’s uncontroversial to note that Christopher Luxon’s basic political skills are coming along more slowly than his supporters hoped. A tiny sample from the last six months: “I’m entitled”, when asked about him claiming the accommodation allowance. Selling a rental property, thereby drawing attention to his vast portfolio. Multiple avoidable fumbles on benefit levels and staffing.
Most recently, it was mangling reading with maths during a press conference in Australia. “If you think about what we are doing with respect to mathematics, when you have 88% of Māori kids at Year 8 unable to read, those are the things and the conversations that we’ve been getting into.”
He made a basic communication error – saying unable to read, versus unable to complete mathematics to the expected level. It was a screw-up, and hardly an isolated one. Reporting on Luxon flubbing routine communications is now almost a beat unto itself. He is not exceptionally bad – Winston Peters is often comically abysmal, though it’s baked into his brand by now. Luxon might also be suffering by comparison, largely because the two most-recent long term prime ministers we’ve had, in Key and Ardern, were exceptionally prepared and precise.
Yet in the scheme of things, he garbled delivery at a press conference. It has distracted from what he was talking about, sure – but were it not for his misspeaking, the point he was trying to make would have gone entirely unreported.
How can we be so sure? Because the sentence is from a press conference which happened on August 16, and only made the news cycle on the evening of August 19, after blowing up on Reddit (as Meta and Twitter become less useful for news, Reddit continues to rise in salience). This shows the extent to which viral social content now drives the news agenda, sure – but it reveals something bigger, while also pointing to what is considered acceptable in our politics.
Namely that his sloppy language causes more concern, while troubling reading and maths attainment levels are now baked into our operating environment. This data was reported (and partly disputed) some weeks ago, but it did not mark a major break from the established narrative of an arc of achievement bending south. We talk about a cost-of-living crisis, a housing crisis, a health crisis (rightly, on all fronts) – but educational achievement levels that head one way don’t attract anything like the same consternation.
They’re part of a litany of worrying statistics around academic achievement, both external markers like the most-recent PISA study (itself masking the real level, due to some schools refusing to participate) and internal, like the MOE’s own data. For those who believe in education as a valve to reset inequality, there’s also a bleak trend noted by education minister Erica Stanford: the rise in middle-class parents using costly private tuition to bridge attainment gaps.
It’s entirely fair to argue about the contributors to the decline in educational attainment. The right says it’s down to excessive Covid-era school closures, a culture of lower attendance, open-plan classrooms, new teaching theories emphasising decolonisation over basic building blocks like maths and writing, along with the “balanced literacy” approach to teaching reading. The left says poverty, hunger, overcrowded housing, the impact of Covid, inequality of access to technology and lower status and pay afforded to teachers. The truth is surely some combination of the two perspectives.
Yet one thing that is really different about this government is its request to have its success measured and regularly reported as a matter of considerable emphasis. This is the biggest contrast with the Ardern government. One of its first acts after being elected in 2017 was to abandon national standards in primary schools. They were somewhat controversial, but the process over what might replace them became long and muddled.
For many parents the result was that their child’s educational progress became far more opaque, and the country’s performance across regions, schooling years and demographics became harder to parse. The government has recently moved to reinstate more regular testing, but has selected a testing regime that is more broadly accepted than the national standards of the Key era.
There are arguments that testing can intrude on teaching time or encourage rote learning over more pliable knowledge. But without some sense of how a child is tracking, how can a parent, a school, a system know whether it’s improving or backsliding?
There was also some consternation about the fact Luxon’s statement referenced Māori learning levels, that Luxon said “unable to read” rather than “unable to add”, when neither is a great way of characterising the more complex reality. It connected to the coalition government’s fractious relationship with Māori. “If the state tells you that you are sick, dumb and poor enough times, you will grow up sick, dumb and poor,” wrote former NZ First and National MP Tau Henare in lambasting Luxon’s comment.
This might be the charge that stings and sticks most out of the episode. Luxon leads a coalition government that has a difficult relationship with Māori across a plethora of fronts, from te reo in the public service to the wind-back of Māori wards to Act’s Treaty Principles Bill. National has tried to position itself as the adult in the room, trying to “take the temperature down”, as John Key suggested. Sloppy language from the very top hardly helps make that thesis land.
Still, for all the justifiable critiques of both government policy broadly and Luxon’s style narrowly, the emphasis on curriculum measurement, targets and measurement – one it says it wants to mirror across the state – is a welcome change. Within education, it’s being driven by a energetic minister in Stanford, and means that come the next election there will be a raft of evidence about whether its programme is succeeding or failing. Voters will ultimately able to issue a verdict on that basis. Surely that is the whole point of government – and significantly more important than a garbled sentence.