The Q+A host talks about the struggle to get the PM to appear – and how he is preparing to host the first big leaders’ debate.
December 2024. It was the month the Fast-Track Approvals Bill passed into law. Liam Lawson was named a member of the Red Bull Racing team. And it was the last time Christopher Luxon appeared on Q+A.
Since then, he’s declined every invitation to appear on the weekly TVNZ1 current affairs programme. “We have an open invitation,” Jack Tame told The Spinoff for an episode of At Large with Toby Manhire. “If he or his team are listening right now, we would be delighted to have the prime minister on. We can do any time that suits you. We’ll make it work”
The relationship with the prime minister’s office was “very cordial and respectful”, Tame said. “When we ask if he’s available, I think we’re usually told something along the lines of, ‘We’re sorry, the prime minister is not available.’”
Why does Tame reckon he won’t appear? “I don’t know. I mean, I can appreciate a couple of things. First of all, politicians and especially prime ministers have astronomical demands on their time and attention. I also think there is a material difference in coming on a political interview show where you might be interviewed for 25 or 30 minutes. Sometimes it can be quite a confrontational environment, and the level of preparation that might be required to come on a show like that far outweighs the level of preparation that might be required for weekly news hits.”
Luxon can hardly be accused of avoiding questions. He might have quit his weekly engagement on TVNZ Breakfast and ghosted Q+A, but he faces the media most Mondays for a post-cabinet press conference, keeps weekly appointments on RNZ and Newstalk ZB, and speaks to reporters on the parliamentary tiles and at standups around the country.
“The prime minister does make himself regularly available for interviews with other shows,” said Tame. “I would argue that there is a distinct difference between being in a situation where you are taking a sustained line of questions from one interviewer relative to those other environments, so when you’ve got the press gallery all shouting questions, absolutely that’s scrutiny. There is, I would argue, more depth when an interviewer is able to kind of meticulously prosecute a case or follow a whole line of questions that perhaps isn’t realised in a group setting.”
As for the weekly sit-downs, “every politician, especially ones who reach cabinet or the ninth floor, is just just so embarrassingly media trained that they are very very capable of spinning and twisting and talking for seven or eight minutes or nine minutes, however long they need in order to soak up the time and get out.”
That marked out the “really strong communicators” from the more ordinary, he suggested. “It’s the difference between answering a question and not answering a question. Some politicians, I think, have got to a point where they are so media trained that they default to message and they default to not answering a question and trying to pivot onto a point they want to make, rather than simply engaging and acknowledging the trade-offs that are inherent in policymaking.”
Luxon is not alone in snubbing Q+A. “There are some cabinet ministers whom we requested many times who didn’t come on, or haven’t been on in some time. We’ve requested Louise Upston many times recently – many many times – and her team say they’ve tried to make things work with her schedule, but they haven’t been able to make it work. I recall we requested Casey Costello many times. Winston Peters hasn’t been on this term, so he hasn’t been on for three years now.”
Next week, Tame will host the first leader debate of the campaign, for TVNZ1. He’s moderated multi-party debates before, but this is his first with the top dogs. How is he approaching the task?
“My sense is that the best debates have a little bit of surprise and delight,” said Tame.
“So you cover off the kind of key policy stuff, especially when you’re producing a debate for a broad audience.” But in the cause of steering the leaders “away from their cue cards and all of the rehearsals that they’ve done, away from their media minders”, he said, “I always think getting them to talk about values is good… getting them to talk about the things that matter to them in a way that they haven’t rehearsed, and so that’s what I’m kind of thinking about at the moment. Not a grilling, necessarily, but an opportunity to compare and contrast their values.”
As to whether he would take a leaf out of the book of Patrick Gower, he said: “Paddy’s a master… Paddy seemed to have a habit of demanding that they commit to significant policies on the spot. So maybe we’ll try and do a bit of that.”
For more episodes of At Large with Toby Manhire, follow here for Spotify, or here for Apple. For YouTube, subscribe to the Spinoff here and find the full set here.
