John Campbell: What exactly has the tide brought in?

Analysis: His CV reveals an impressive history in brand management but, John Campbell asks, what was Christopher Luxon actually selling? Because whatever it was, New Zealand has bought it.

On Saturday the 14th, or early on Sunday morning (after getting home from TVNZ’s election coverage), I tried to understand what, exactly, we’d voted for.

For. As in what hopes we carried with us into those cardboard polling booths. (Or expectations, if “hopes” feels too grand.)

Five hours of live TV leaves you wired like a substation. I sat on the couch for a long time, the night echoing with the roar of the big tides Chris Hipkins talked about in his concession speech, the dog keeping me solicitous company, the blackbirds who nest in the feijoa hedge beginning to stir, and I thought about what we’d aspired to, rather than what we’d rejected.

"Tomorrow morning, New Zealanders are going to wake up to not only a new day, but the promise of a new government and a new direction," Christopher Luxon said, as he spoke to National’s jubilant supporters on Auckland’s waterfront.

A “new day”, a “new government”, a “new direction”.

On he went, triumphantly, as large and largely meaningless as a decommissioned lighthouse. He was winning election night word-bingo. He was Boris Johnson channelling a Reader’s Digest Winston Churchill. He was the talking mechanism from inside the flawless, plastic body of an action doll.

Making the country “so much better than it is”, Christopher Luxon said. Taking “New Zealand forward,” he said. Getting us “back on track”.

Tides. Tracks. New.

It felt like we were being Kondoed. That the incoming PM was a louder, headier version of the person carrying a literal broom who moved into shot behind our senior political reporter, Benedict Collins, at the Lower Hutt Town Hall just before midnight on Saturday, where the Labour faithful had chanted “Chippy” as if a kind of hug (one of the few human moments in Labour’s inexplicably lifeless campaign), before immediately going home, leaving the venue bereft of all but Benedict, the crew filming him, and the worker sweeping that short, sad wake into history.

“For all those that didn’t vote for National, we won’t let you down,” Christopher Luxon promised.

Many of “those”, particularly those who didn’t vote at all, wouldn’t have been listening. They do not think the tides are for them. Or they don’t even notice them – too busy as they are trying to stay afloat.

Tax cuts. Which at lower income levels will mean from little to nothing. National’s policy is worth $10 a week on the minimum wage – and zero dollars a week on a benefit. And while the policy’s much reported headline figure does indeed add up to $250 per fortnight – it only does so in about 3000 homes.

A windfall for landlords, but not (so much) for tenants. We voted for that.

Benefit sanctions. Including on beneficiary families with children. Yes, despite all we've learnt about the impact of economic deprivation on childhood wellbeing and therefore on the rest of life, we voted for those.

Getting tougher on crime. (But less so on the shadow-childhoods of deprivation and disadvantage that are disproportionately likely to lead to crime.) We voted for that.

Cuts to the public service. We voted for that.

More roads and strikingly little action on climate change. We voted for that.

Scrapping Te Aka Whai Ora (the Māori Health Authority). National supporters voted for that. ACT supporters did too, and went further, also voting to “Abolish Demographic Ministries” and for a referendum on the Treaty.

We voted, in short, to resuscitate a conservative, free enterprise, largely male, largely Pākehā, status-quo, inject it with the adrenaline of self-made-man aspiration, dress it in the smart-casual ubiquity of a mobile banker, give it a Pepsi Max and BBQ tongs, and call it a “new direction”.

New? Not even close. Not even the polo-shirted version of it that John Key brought to market. Keith Holyoake with a slicker line in slogans.

National’s traditional beneficiaries recognised it immediately. So much so that as soon as last Wednesday, just eleven days after the polls closed, economist Tony Alexander was able to discern that property investors, “clearly interpret the election outcome as reducing concerns for them”.

Writing for OneRoof, under the heading “The change in government is having a positive effect on investor sentiment” Alexander reported, “Anticipation that interest expense deductibility will be restored is being greeted positively by investors”.

(Woah! Really?! WHAT A SURPRISE!)

The “proportion of investors saying that they are concerned about tenant legislation has just fallen to a record low of only 9 percent,” Alexander continued. “This likely reflects National’s plans to reintroduce no-cause lease terminations.”

Likely?! Lol.

Yes, before special votes have been counted, before a government has been formed, property investors and landlords already understand this is a win for them.

And if it’s a win for them, what does it mean for tenants, and for those hoping to buy their first home?

That election night promise, “we won’t let you down”, where are its policy manifestations for those who don’t own investment properties? Those whose version of the Kiwi dream doesn’t even include owning their own home? Those on whom the waves crash hardest. And never stop crashing. Not the “squeezed middle”, but those out of view beneath it. Not waving but drowning.

“I believe in tackling inequality”, Christopher Luxon said, in his first speech to Parliament. It was March 2021. He was the last of the new intake of MPs from the 2020 election to give their maiden speech.

Just 31 months later, he’s the incoming Prime Minister.

“It's not good enough saying you're going to lower greenhouse gas emissions but not doing it,” he said, in 2021. “It's not good enough saying you're going to reduce child poverty but not actually doing it. Talking about it gets you a headline, but doing it makes a difference. I've entered politics because I want to make a difference, I want to solve problems, and I want to get things done.”

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions? Reducing child poverty?

I know this is appearing on the website of a Crown entity company, and there are appropriate standards to be observed, and board members may be reading, and my mum, but what the actual f#@*?

National’s campaign was so empty of genuine vision in these areas, of transformative policy, and of binding commitments beyond rhetorical aspiration, that Christopher Luxon’s sloganeering zeal and infinite energy served as a kind of Trojan Horse.

But where the original design concealed part of an army, the absurdist brilliance of Luxon’s horse lay in the fact that it really was hollow. Oh, it looked like there was something in it. Luxon made it sound like there was something in it. He rode it like Opie Bosson. But that big old National horse was empty.

And here’s where Chris Luxon is the perfect leader for a party largely devoid of ideology. He talks constantly about his role at Air New Zealand, but the salesman we saw on the campaign trail was the star embodiment of skills he perfected at Unilever, much earlier in his career. His LinkedIn profile tells us he began as a “Management Trainee”, then became a “Brand Manager”, and then rose, and rose, to become “President & CEO” in Canada.

Think of it. All that selling. All that belief. All that fervour.

The Unilever details aren’t repeated with anything like the frequency of his Air New Zealand legend. But when Luxon got the job of Air New Zealand CEO, the airline released a statement through NZX that tells us one of his roles was “Global Deodorants and Grooming Category Director."

What a brilliant apprenticeship for a politician! Rising through the ranks of a company that sells Rexona, Lynx, Persil and Surf.

Are you and your family sick and tired of Labour stains? Wash them out – with National!

On the Tuesday after the Saturday night in which the tides, or the wash cycle, or the Surf, swept one Chris in and another Chris out, the new Labour MP for Mt Albert, Helen White, arrived in Wellington.

In 2020, Jacinda Ardern’s majority in the Mt Albert electorate was 21,246 votes. With special votes still to be counted, that’s fallen 99.5 percent to 106 votes.

It’s an extraordinary story. National has never won Mt Albert, ever. 1946 until 2023 – 100 percent Labour MPs. But the preliminary results have National ahead in the party vote.

How did Helen White feel about that devastating and unprecedented result? “I did really, really well,” she told reporters.

Really and really. Both. She did that well.

It was so at odds with reality it made Chris Luxon looked restrained. His Trojan Horse was only empty. Helen White arrived on an ass and insisted it was Phar Lap.

I tell this story not to kick someone when they’re down, and Helen White’s not down, she did “really, really well”, but to attempt to look into the heart of Labour’s defeat.

It now seems conceivable that Labour had no idea how estranged they had become from the country. That the whole Party thought it was doing “really, really well”, or that its 2020 Covid management, and the unprecedented scale of its victory in that year’s election, had somehow made 2023 a sure bet.

It wasn’t.

This isn’t only about taking the first majority Government in almost three decades of MMP and largely squandering it.

This isn’t only about ruling out a wealth tax or a capital gains tax, on the basis of what appears to have been truly useless focus group information.

This isn’t only about taking 50 percent of the vote in 2020 and turning it into 26.85 percent on election night in 2023. It’s not only about losing Auckland Central, Wellington Central and Rongotai to the Greens. It’s not only about Labour legacy candidates like Nanaia Mahuta and Rino Tirikatene losing their seats to Te Pāti Māori. It’s also about losing the people who didn’t vote.

“We do not have government by the majority,” Thomas Jefferson said. “We have government by the majority who participate.”

I’m sorry to repeat myself. That Jefferson truth is from a piece I wrote for the Saturday before polling day.

I had hoped to encourage people to vote.

I went to Ōtara, when I met Meretuahiahi Molyneux, aged 19, who was casting her first vote, and Julian Hafoka, aged 24, who was voting in his third election.

I liked them both, very much. I didn’t ask who they were voting for, but they made me hopeful of participation. And Parliaments are shaped by those who participate.

“Vote,” Mere and Julian pleaded.

In Epsom, I wrote, the enrolment rate for 18-to-24-year-olds was 85 percent. In Māngere, it was 46 percent.

What a terrible absence. What an indictment that Labour couldn’t engage those young people. Couldn’t persuade them that they mattered. Couldn’t make them believe that politics was for them.

On the Monday morning after election weekend, Bernard Hickey had quickly crunched the numbers.

“Electoral Commission figures show there were just over 1.060 million missing voters in the election out of a total eligible population of 3.871 million, with enrolment data and surveys showing most were young renters.”

And what did their absence contribute to? Tax cuts for landlords.

Remember what Tony Alexander told us – that property investors “clearly interpret the election outcome as reducing concerns for them”.

Did property investors vote? You betcha. Every, single one of them. They knew where their best interests resided.

Labour couldn’t mobilise young people in the country’s poorest electorates to do the same thing. That’s on Labour. And it’s a terrible failure.

I wrote about this, again and again.

I met young people who spoke explicitly of the discouragement and alienation of not seeing themselves reflected in the election campaign. In July, I reflected on the move away from the vanilla centre. I talked about the stifling orthodoxy and risk-averse centrism of a Chris v. Chris contest which aspired to nothing so much as who could stand for less. And, in May of last year, I considered (at great length) how poverty had disappeared from our political discourse. How we were looking away from it.

National and Labour think the centre holds, but the results tell different stories.

In fact, 38.99 percent is a low figure for National when it wins. Under John Key, National were made government with 44.93 percent of the vote in 2008, 47.99 percent in 2011, and 47.04 percent in 2014. National’s 2023 performance was significantly below those figures. The country didn’t emphatically want National, it just wanted Labour less. Labour’s vote went left to the Greens, it went right to National, it went to Te Pāti Māori, and it stayed at home.

And staying at home speaks of something larger than pendulum swings, and tides, and cycles. It speaks of people being lost.

And when Labour loses people like that, what, exactly, is the point of Labour?

On election night 2020, Jacinda Ardern spoke of “governing for everyone”. Three years later, “everyone” deserted Labour to such a great extent that its share of the vote has almost halved.

Now, Christopher Luxon is promising the same thing. “For all those that didn’t vote for National, we won’t let you down.”

But National’s policies suggest “those” people aren’t even in view.

Property investors know who National sees – them.

And so here we stand, on the edge of status-quo orthodoxy, or vapidity, waiting to see how much influence David Seymour will have. Waiting to see whether the cost of a coalition will be an unnecessary and incendiary referendum. Waiting to see whether Winston Peters will be required, with whatever Faustian pact that may involve.

In 1996, coalition negotiations took weeks. National were on one side of Bowen Street, Labour on the other. New Zealand First were seeking comfort from them both. Back and forth they went, along the travelator that runs beneath the road. It felt as endless as those dreadful competitions where the person who keeps their hand on the car longest, wins it.

And that empty, too.

“I don't recall any decent conversation about the values and vision we were bringing to government, or the kind of government we wanted to be”, Deborah Morris-Travers later wrote.

She was 26. A new MP. She hoped they would go with Labour. They went with National. It was a disaster. Morris-Travers resigned from New Zealand First two years later and has never returned to Parliament. In the election that followed, New Zealand First’s party vote fell from 13.35 percent to 4.26 percent.

And now they’re back.

Tides.

Labour’s tide is out. They were swept out to sea on a giant sausage roll.

The Government that convened the Welfare Expert Advisory Group and then didn’t fully implement a single one of its recommendations has had its turn.

“I’m in despair," Susan St John told me when I phoned her at the end of September.

Associate economics professor at the University of Auckland, founding member of the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG), Susan St John took stock of what’s been achieved in the past six years, and contrasted it against what she had dared to hope might happen.

“They’ve let us down,” she said. Sadly.

And now, in comes National.

A new day, a new government, a new direction. Taking "New Zealand forward”.

Will it be forward?

And if so, for whom?

At the end of that echoing night I spent trying to work out what, really, we had voted for, I remembered the ending of The Great Gatsby.

“So, we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”