The prime minister will no longer do his weekly TVNZ interview. Is he, too, a ‘lightweight’?
The New Zealand prime minister has decided future appearances on the high-profile breakfast programme will be on an ad hoc basis, with the regular weekly booking removed from the diary.
Let’s cross immediately to Mike Hosking.
The prime minister is “running for the hills”, he says. The Beehive might say it’s just part of a review of media appearances but “the somewhat tragic conclusion that is drawn is that the questions [the PM] gets, the demand for a level of accountability, is a little bit tough”.
Hosking’s assessment is that “they are just over being held to account”.
There’s only one way to interpret the decision. “It speaks to a lack of backbone”, he says, to “bail and run”. And, “it speaks to an increasingly apparent trait: they don’t handle pressure well”.
It’s a pity, he says, that the PM “isn’t a more robust operator”, but instead “a lightweight at answering tough questions”.
If it’s not obvious already, the above remarks, verbatim Hosking though they are, were made five years ago, when a different prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, withdrew from a different weekly media appointment, with Mike Hosking on Newstalk ZB.
He would elaborate later on his view. “She hates a hard question. She hates fact. She hates accountability. She hates not being fawned over.”
It would be unreasonable to expect Hosking to be as vehement in his judgment of Luxon’s decision, which came in a hectic week that also saw the prime minister upbraid the media for its “soap opera” fascination over reported dissatisfaction with his leadership from within caucus ranks and the lodging of a formal complaint about the TVNZ press gallery’s pursuit of chief whip Stuart Smith. He had, after all, formed a view of Ardern pretty clearly before then.
As well as being a formidably talented broadcaster, he delights in his consistent ability to out-rate his rivals. But whether that competitive streak is enough to overwhelm the point of principle remains to be seen. Over recent months, Hosking seems to spend as much time coaching the prime minister as he does interviewing him. It wouldn’t surprise me if, on Tuesday, he asks him some tough questions about answering tough questions.
To be clear, prime ministers are free to choose whom they speak with. The media constellation has changed dramatically over recent decades, both in range of outlets and the burgeoning of direct and unmediated formats on foreign-based social platforms. Ardern was the first prime minister to really master all that.
And though Luxon seems to be shrinking his mainstream media appearances – he dropped his Tuesday “bridge run” in 2024, and he hasn’t graced the Q+A studio for 18 months – he continues to take questions from the press pretty much every day, including regular standups and a weekly post-cabinet press conference, an important ask-me-anything that prime ministers before him, including David Lange and Jim Bolger, have at one point abandoned. Luxon’s mentor, John Key, chucked in his weekly spots on Morning Report and that didn’t do him any harm.
It could be a tactically smart thing he’s doing – do fewer interviews and do them better. While you could hardly say the interrogation has been in any way caustic, Luxon has for some reason found it difficult talking to Tova O’Brien in the few weeks since she joined Breakfast, mawkishly seeking to chum up with reference to the old days, declaring himself the CEO, and plain forgetting that Tama Potaka is in his cabinet.
The risk, at a time when Luxon’s leadership is under such scrutiny, is looking, well, less leaderly, in eschewing the chance to speak to as many New Zealanders as possible and make the case in the face of difficult questions.
Ardern choosing to quit the weekly Hosking interview looked like the act of someone who was losing the will to endure such unpleasant encounters with a greater prize in mind – a clue, in retrospect, that there was diminishing gas in the tank. Just over a year ago, Tory Whanau, then Wellington mayor set on re-election, ended her monthly slot on Newstalk ZB as “part of a broader effort to diversify our media engagements”. That was a harbinger, too. A couple of months later, she announced her retirement from politics.
