Christopher Luxon’s off-the-cuff constitutional check-in turns into a poorly timed unforced error, writes Henry Oliver in today’s excerpt from The Bulletin.

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Yesterday, with little prompting and no warning to his colleagues, prime minister Christopher Luxon said he’d hold a referendum on MMP if re-elected. Luxon floated the idea on Kerry Woodham Mornings on Newstalk ZB in response to a listener text asking whether he would address the power held by minor parties in government. Pressed on whether he’d commit to it if returned to office, he said simply, as if it were no big deal: “Yeah, I think I would.” 

He went on to argue MMP forces him to govern alongside “some yahoo or numpty from some other party,” urging voters to back National directly if they wanted to avoid that outcome – before clarifying, when asked, that he wasn’t describing his current Cabinet colleagues that way, just suggesting National could do better on its own.

No one saw it coming

Winston Peters, perhaps history’s biggest beneficiary of MMP, wasted no time rejecting the idea, calling it “inexplicable” in a social media post and later telling reporters it had come as an “absolute surprise,” as reported by 1News. He said he’d travelled the country extensively and nobody had ever raised MMP with him, and struggled to believe National had even discussed the idea as a caucus. Asked whether the referendum call reflected Luxon’s anxiety about the polls, Peters immediately agreed. He argued MMP had broken the “stranglehold” of the two major parties, and cast the referendum push as an attempt by National and Labour to rig the system back in their favour now that their grip on power was slipping.

That reaction was echoed by his own colleagues’ surprise. On their way into the house, National MPs sidestepped questions about whether they’d known the announcement was coming, as reported by RNZ, with minister Louise Upston instead describing it as Luxon “reflecting a conversation” many New Zealanders were already having. NZ First minister Casey Costello said she hoped Luxon wasn’t referring to her party, while Peters slyly said it was time for “a parent-child conversation.”

Personal musing or party policy?

As of this morning, National still hadn’t settled on a single line. According to Newsroom’s Sam Sachdeva, campaign chair Simeon Brown insisted the comments weren’t a formal announcement, just Luxon “on radio giving a view,” while Simon Watts took the opposite position, saying Luxon had been “pretty clear” a vote would be held, and Mark Mitchell claimed the remarks were “not relevant to this election” in one breath while saying National would “look at” a referendum next term in the next.

By today, Luxon had doubled down, telling Stuff he wanted to make a four-year-term referendum a priority after the election and “throw” MMP in alongside it – even as Chris Bishop insisted, in the same story, that it wasn’t party policy. Bishop maintained that position in a separate interview with NZ Herald, again describing Luxon’s comments as mere “musings,” while Luxon himself stopped short of calling it formal policy, saying instead his real priority was economic growth.

A poorly timed unforced error

Sachdeva argued that the closer it’s examined, the shakier the substance of the idea looks. When John Key called for an MMP referendum ahead of the 2008 election, he did so from a position of strength – National polling near 50% and pointing to visible dysfunction in the outgoing Labour-led government – and even then it failed. Luxon, by contrast, is leading a National Party closer to 25% in the polls, after years of being visibly overshadowed by Peters and Seymour, making the referendum call look less like principle and more like frustration at his own flagging position and struggles managing the coalition.

He also noted the timing compounded the damage: what should have been a good day for National – Chris Bishop announcing the City Rail Link’s opening date, and a fresh opportunity to attack Labour over its move to scrap the Investment Boost policy – was instead swallowed by an unforced error.