Four hundred and nine days from entering politics, Christopher Luxon is the new leader of the National party, promising a "reset" and to lead a party for all New Zealanders.
The former Chief Executive of Air New Zealand and senior executive at Unilever, says he will bring his real world experience to the role, as he rebuilds the party torn apart by division and in-fighting since his mentor and friend John Key left office.
Nicola Willis is deputy leader, but Luxon is yet to allocate porfolios. He tells Kathryn Ryan his background in business rather than politics is a strength.
National Party leader Christopher Luxon. Photo: Supplied / National Party
Listen to the full interview with Christopher Luxon
“My background really is working in large organisations and leading large organisations and building good teams. That’s what I have a track record of, good leadership in the commercial world.
“When you look at what it takes to be a good CEO, solving problems, getting results, getting the best out of people – that’s a big part of what the job of the leader of opposition is. The content might be different, the processes might be different, but a lot of the skills are transferable.”
Luxon has promised a turnaround for national and denies that Air New Zealand was an under performing company that’s been turned around by his successor. He was also an executive at an under performing Unilever division but says that was a “problematical” business for the company.
“Air New Zealand is a great company and has always been a great company and always will be, but each company has different phases and different challenges and in my time we were looking to improve the customer performance, the employee engagement, make it a great place for people to work.
“Let’s be clear, the National Party is turning the page, we put the reset in place, we’re putting the baggage in the past and that’s why leadership does matter because you’ve actually got to get the best out of that caucus, stop making the stories about ourselves and make them about the people of New Zealand.”
He says that, if he were acting in a CEO capacity, he would hire the members of his caucus.
“I’ve got 33 really experienced, talented and competent members. The challenge is how you actually get them hooked up to the right challenge, task and goals and get them playing well together.”
Luxon won’t yet reveal the roles of his caucus members but has said Judith Collins, who suffered a vote of no confidence by the caucus, will have a significant role.
“There is a role for all 33 caucus members. We need the skills of each of those people because they complement each other. That’s what a team’s all about, assembling a team that complements each other.
“I don’t care about the past. I’m not associated or have baggage from the past. I’m here to reset it and move forward and what I can tell you right now is the people of New Zealand are more concerned about the delivery of this government and it’s not that great.
“I appreciate you want to talk about the dramas from the past, that’s lovely… I’m not getting into any of that, what I’m telling you is that an uncontested leadership transition speaks volumes because what that says is all our caucus members are wanting to put the issues of the past aside.”
He says he’s spoken to every caucus member and they all understood is it's a choice between changing the party or not.
“That’s what I was presenting to people, do you want to keep doing it the way we’ve been doing it, which is pretty ineffective, or do you actually want to come together, bind as a team and focus on a goal and go forward?
“There’s too much at stake in this country at the moment, we are not getting things done. There’s a lot of PR, a lot of announcements, a lot of kumbaya, but not a lot of outcome and achievement and results.”
Luxon says the response to Covid-19 in 2020 was good but it’s been “atrocious” in 2021. He gives the example of how few ICU beds are available in hospitals. Although government spending on public health flatlined under the previous National government, Luxon says the Labour government could have incrementally increased ICU beds over the last 12-15 months.
Another issue he wants to tackle is growing inequality in New Zealand.
“Here’s the critical problem in New Zealand over the last 30 years: we are some of the hardest working people on planet Earth but we are not generating enough income or productivity in this economy. That means fundamentally our wages and our salaries are not going up sufficiently and, as a result, people don’t get to have the choices and freedoms about how they get to live their lives as much.
“You’ve got to back and say what’s driving that. The first thing that’s driving it is education and that’s the most startling thing in the last 12 months that I’ve come to understand. We’re in the bottom three of developed countries in maths, reading and science. We used to be in the top. In the last 10 years, the knowledge of an average 15-year-old has slipped tremendously.”
A National government would invest in health and education, Luxon says, and it won’t necessarily have to come at the cost of adding more debt to the books.
“What we’re going to be very focussed on is making sure we’ve got much better quality spending and no wasteful spending. We’ve added 10,000 bureaucrats here in Wellington, it’s $1.3 billion in a short period of time and we haven’t got better outcomes. We don’t have a better education system, we don’t have a better healthcare system.”
Luxon is hesitant to put a stake in the ground for where he wants polling to be for National and instead says the focus is on the result at the 2023 election.
“We’re going to gear the team up so that we’re making continuous progress each and every day, each and every week, so that we are really competitive in 2023 to win it… I want to win 2023 and we can win 2023.