At 9.30am National is holding an emergency caucus meeting to “resolve the issue” of Luxon’s leadership of the party (and the country), writes Henry Oliver in today’s excerpt from The Bulletin.
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If you missed literally all the news yesterday afternoon and evening, at 9.30 this morning National is holding an emergency caucus meeting in parliament to, in the prime minister’s words, “resolve the issue” of his leadership of the party. He probably hopes that means a confirmation of support for his leadership. His rivals in the party probably hope that means one of them walks out of parliament as the 43rd prime minister of New Zealand.
How did we get here?
Depending who you ask, this has been building for a fortnight, or for the better part of a year. Yesterday afternoon, The Spinoff’s editor Veronica Schmidt summarised a brutal run (also here on At Large with Toby Manhire if you’re more of an audio-visual learner): Luxon hazily ruled out any coalition with the Opportunity Party, was forced into an apology after appearing to lecture small business owners in Rotorua, called his own foreign minister’s comments “racist” yet refused to sack him, and then, quite casually on talkback radio, committed National to an MMP referendum that blindsided his own caucus.
Monday night’s Herald story was the spark that lit the fuse this time, with one anonymous MP telling political editor Thomas Coughlan: “There’s going to be change in the top job. It’s just a question of who is going to be it.” By yesterday afternoon, 1News reported senior National MPs were weighing up whether to go to Luxon directly and tell him it was time to resign, with several senior ministers – including Erica Stanford and Simon Watts – conspicuously refusing to back him when asked. Luxon called the emergency meeting himself that evening, posting that “division and disunity” three months from the election was unfair to voters and needed resolving quickly.
It’s the second time in four months he’s faced this exact scenario. He survived an April confidence vote by a margin The Post has reported as 27 to 22, though it says a rival outlet has put it at 28 to 21 – either way, uncomfortably close.
Who’s in the running?
The name that comes up most is education minister Erica Stanford, who The Post’s Nick James notes has been touted for months due to her strong ministerial performance and popularity outside parliament (she pointedly declined to confirm either her ambitions or her confidence in Luxon when hounded by media at Auckland Airport last night). Newsroom’s Sam Sachdeva rates her chances too, noting she could be National’s answer to Jacinda Ardern’s 2017 surge, though, as the Herald’s Audrey Young reported last year, she is “more popular outside the caucus than inside it” and “is not considered a team player”. According to reporting from the Herald this morning, MP Chris Penk has been “engaging National MPs to see whether she could have the numbers”.
Chris Bishop is the other frontrunner, holding housing, transport, infrastructure and RMA reform, with well-honed political experience from his time advising Gerry Brownlee and Steven Joyce. He publicly supported Luxon yesterday, but Sachdeva notes he’s long been rumoured as an internal agitator for change, which cuts both ways – as the saying goes, “the person who wields the knife never wears the crown.”
Mark Mitchell, Nicola Willis and Simeon Brown round out the list; Willis has the finance credentials but is arguably too close to Luxon’s own record to offer a clean reset, while Brown, at 35, would become the youngest New Zealand prime minister ever. The Herald’s Coughlan reported a proposed unity ticket of Stanford as leader, Mitchell as deputy and Bishop as finance minister had been discussed, though sources stressed nothing was locked in.
What else do we know?
Not much. Yet. Willis and Bishop have both said publicly they have confidence in Luxon; so have Mark Mitchell, Matt Doocey and National’s president Sylvia Wood. But as of Tuesday night, a striking number of senior figures – not just Stanford, but Louise Upston, Paul Goldsmith, Chris Penk and Simon Watts – hadn’t given anything on the record. Former PM Sir John Key was reported to be working the phones on Luxon’s behalf, though Key told the Herald that was “untrue.”
The Spinoff’s Lyric Waiwiri-Smith gathered a range of outside views on whether a change even makes sense this close to an election. Commentator Jacqui van der Kaay framed it as weighing the risk of keeping an unpopular leader against the risk of a messy, unpredictable changeover, while PR consultant David Cormack warned that rolling Luxon risks destabilising the coalition entirely if NZ First’s Winston Peters decides to “pull the pin” in response. Former National MP Claudette Hauiti was blunter, arguing the party should have moved yesterday.
NZ First strategists told The Post’s Anneke Smith a leadership change “would not necessarily be the end of the coalition,” while ACT’s David Seymour dismissed the whole saga as a distraction from what actually matters: “We’re talking about people and the country needs policy and principles.”
What happens next?
We wait and see. And refresh our browsers constantly. On The Spinoff right now, we already have Toby Manhire and Alice Neville on the tools, liveblogging the whole thing. They’ll keep you up to date with all the news, gossip, innuendo, tea-leaf reading, until the prime minister (whoever that may be) walks out to meet the sleep-deprived-and-highly-
