With Chris Hipkins overtaking him as preferred PM, Christopher Luxon’s position has never been shakier. But is a leadership spill really possible, asks Catherine McGregor in today’s extract from The Bulletin.
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Hipkins pips Luxon for preferred PM
For the first time since the election in October 2023, Chris Hipkins has overtaken Christopher Luxon as the preferred prime minister in a key poll – though only by a hair. The latest Taxpayer’s Union-Curia poll has Chris Hipkins jumping 3.1 points to 20.7%, beating Luxon on 20.3%. Perhaps surprisingly given the increasing number of negative headlines about Luxon’s leadership in recent weeks, Hipkins’ gains come not from Luxon – the PM only dropped 0.4% points from last month’s poll – but rather from Greens co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick, who fell 4.1 points to 4.8%. David Seymour dropped 1.4 points to 5.0%.
As for party support, Monday’s poll (conducted March 2-4) shows increases in support for National, Labour and Te Pāti Māori, with Act, the Greens and NZ First sinking. The poll again shows that, were the election to be held today, the left bloc of Labour, the Greens and TPM would be able to form a government.
Where is Luxon going wrong?
While the TPU-Curia poll was in the field after Luxon’s car crash Hosking interview, it was completed before speculation about his leadership really picked up steam. In yesterday’s Bulletin we picked out a couple of choice quotes from Duncan Garner’s excoriation of Luxon in the Listener, but doubts about the PM’s future are being raised elsewhere as well. In the NZ Herald (Premium paywalled), Matthew Hooton focuses on Luxon’s alleged mishandling of the global investment summit – Luxon’s brainchild – which opens this Thursday. The summit is now in Chris Bishop’s hands, Hooton writes, and “the best that can be expected is that Bishop has managed to put some lipstick on Luxon’s pig”.
Over in Newsroom, Peter Dunne argues that what was, pre-election, one of Luxon’s greatest strengths – his ability to be a “clear-thinking, decisive leader” – today comes across “more and more like staccato, rote-learnt messages being recited in a robotic way”. Still, Dunne isn’t convinced by Garner’s claim that Luxon is living on borrowed time. “For National, winning and holding power is its dominant political aspiration. Every time they have changed leaders during a term of government – 1957, 1972, 1997 and 2016 – they have lost the next election. They are not going to tempt fate once again.”
‘As if someone tricked a labrador into putting on a suit’
But let’s just imagine Luxon were to go – who would replace him? According to Danyl McLauchlan in the Listener (paywalled), it would ultimately come down to Nicola Willis or Chris Bishop. (Side note: apparently they’re a ‘“power duo” sometimes referred to as “Bishola”???)
In Willis’s favour, “her admirers argue her talents are more suited to the leadership role than the technocratic grind of the finance portfolio. And National struggles with women voters: if her caucus saw evidence she could turn that around, she would be hard to argue against,” writes McLauchlan.
“But Bishop has been the more impressive minister. He cuts a somewhat dishevelled figure – as if someone tricked a labrador into putting on a suit – but he’s a shrewd strategist and formidable debater with a knack for seeing the systemic issues behind a problem.”
Related:
- Jenna Lynch: The PM needs his political radar to flick on – urgently (Stuff)
- Christopher Luxon’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week. (The Spinoff)
- The curious case of Christopher Luxon’s Bayly equivocations (Gone By Lunchtime podcast)
