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| Tough Assignment: The first lesson Christopher Luxon will have to learn is that being Prime Minister is not at all the same as being CEO. Political power is always and everywhere a matter of negotiation. Even dictators discover how dangerous it is to try and rule arbitrarily, and alone. Those who tried did not remain dictators very long. |
CHRISTOPHER LUXON has shown himself to be a fast learner when it comes to mastering the skills required to win. Now, having won, he cannot avoid revealing how quickly he can master the art of governing.
The first lesson he will have to learn is that being Prime Minister is not at all the same as being CEO. Political power is always and everywhere a matter of negotiation. Even dictators discover how dangerous it is to try and rule arbitrarily, and alone. Those who tried did not remain dictators very long.
And, it won’t be long before New Zealand’s new leader’s ability to manage change is put to the test. We must all hope that Luxon takes to governing as readily as he took to campaigning.
Who’s going to test him? Not Winston Peters. The leader of NZ First is in the box seat – and he knows it. Without NZ First’s 8 votes, Luxon cannot inform the Governor-General that he has the confidence of the House of Representatives. No, the person most likely to test Luxon’s political abilities is the biggest loser from the final vote count, David Seymour.
National needed the Act Party to do much better than it ended up doing in the 2023 General Election. In the final tally, Act’s Party Vote, at 8.64 percent, was only 1.05 percentage points higher than the party’s 2020 total. The actual result was well short of the support it was racking-up in pre-election polls – which climbed as high as 14 percent.
No one needed to tell Seymour who was responsible for Act’s collapse from double to single figures. Winston Peters campaigning skills (not insignificantly boosted by several large donations to NZ First) did not take long to manifest themselves – not once the triennial Joker in the pack got back out on the road. It was a test. Could Seymour maintain his winning political persona in the face of Peters’ superb demonstration (best ad’ of the campaign) of just how comfortable he was in the saddle? The answer turned out to be: “Only just.”
The first sign of Seymour’s jitters was his truculent response to the discovery of one or two questionable candidates on Act’s Party List. It was a nothing story. By the time the airwaves were carrying their names, the “unacceptable” candidates were no longer standing. The incident, responded to sensibly, could have reaffirmed Seymour’s impressive control over his party. Yes, someone had blundered, but just look at how quickly the problem was solved. That’s the sort of leader New Zealand needs!
Truculence – bordering on petulance – was a new look for Seymour, and the voters didn’t like it. One didn’t need a degree in political science to join the dots. As NZ First continued its relentless rise towards electoral viability, the Act leader was showing dangerous signs of losing his political composure altogether. How else to explain his otherwise inexplicable threat to get rid of the statutory holiday after New Year’s Day? No one was asking for it. No one wanted it. Act appeared to be going doolally.
Seymour’s threat to take his party onto the cross-benches and restrict its support for National to votes of confidence – but not supply – received much criticism, but it was exactly what Act needed. It served as a jarring reminder, not only to Luxon and National, but also to all right-wing voters, that Seymour and his party were not the sort of politicians to be taken for granted. They may not be able to ride horses, but they sure-as-shit could shoot them.
Christopher Luxon would be wise to bear that in mind as he and his negotiating team flit between Act and NZ First in search of sweet harmony. Seymour absolutely cannot be made to look like an MMP cuckold: watching the object of his political affections lavishing generous concessions upon a third party. Making Act look impotent would be the surest way of making Seymour prove to the whole world what a hard bargainer he can be.
The issue most likely to ensure that Act and its leader become the centre of attention is the future of Te Tiriti. No other policy is more likely to test the mettle of New Zealand’s new prime minister. No other policy is more likely to make National jump the wrong way.
Luxon’s advisers are practically certain to tell him that this is not an issue which engages the concern of more than a very small percentage of New Zealanders, and that exposing his new government to the barrage of abuse that was bound to follow any major concession to Act on Te Tiriti would be a catastrophic mistake.
Luxon should ignore his advisers.
No other issue speaks as clearly to the political and cultural divide presently separating New Zealanders than the current definition of Te Tiriti, and all the highly controversial policy decisions mandated and empowered by its constitutionally transformational elements. If National refuses to address this issue, humiliating Act in the process, then two very dangerous things will happen.
First. Among a significant percentage of the electorate (the people who no longer tell pollsters what they truly believe) the perception will take hold that Luxon lacks the courage to accept the mandate which his election victory has bestowed upon him. At the heart of that mandate is a commission to confront, head-on, the constitutional and cultural assumptions of the judicial, bureaucratic, academic and media elites, as they have grown and developed since 2017, and to roll them back. To make it clear from the very start that “decolonisation” and “indigenisation” are not among the priorities of the incoming government. If Luxon encourages the perception that National is “wimping out” on his mandate, then National’s political hegemony will be put at serious risk.
Second. Any attempt by National to rule out a referendum on Te Tiriti, will leave Seymour and Act with no option but to seize the mandate, which Luxon has spurned, for itself. That can only mean taking up an independent position on the cross-benches, and forcing National and NZ First to win Act’s support for every single item on their legislative agenda.
To avoid this political disaster – the most likely outcome of which would be a new election, throwing up a balance of parliamentary forces little changed from the present – Luxon must display the full range of his leadership skills.
If Seymour and Peters could be jointly commissioned by the Prime Minister with organising and encouraging the broadest possible discussion and debate about Te Tiriti, involving the broadest possible cross-section of the New Zealand population, then Act’s referendum would likely not be necessary. Such a genuinely democratic exercise would expose just how isolated the promoters of decolonisation and indigenisation are from the rest of the nation. Nothing could make clearer the elites’ lack of genuine political support. The revolutionaries embedded in the nation’s key institutions would have to come up with a new and improved strategy.
Luxon, himself, would likely emerge from this process as both a statesman and a peacemaker. Simply allowing Seymour’s plan to proceed, unmoderated, to the point of staging a binding referendum on the meaning of Te Tiriti, would provoke massive – and potentially violent – political resistance. Certainly, Te Pāti Māori and the Greens are gearing-up for a stoush which, according to Labour’s Willie Jackson, would be “five times, ten times” worse than the hugely divisive Springbok Tour protests of 1981. Opting, instead, for an open-ended, state-facilitated, and truly public discussion about the country’s constitutional future would cast Luxon as the wise and courageous champion of New Zealand’s liberal democracy. The last time National had a leader who made that his mission, it was in office for the next 12 years.
This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 6 November 2023.
