Who is willing to argue that the business of politics should not be the politics of business?

By Chris Trotter*

As surprising as it sounds, Christopher Luxon is in his fifth year as leader of the National Party. He took over the job on 30 November 2021 after Judith Collins had been roughly elbowed aside by her caucus colleagues.

In electing Luxon, National’s MPs were reaching for the reassurance of proven corporate experience. The slogan “less government in business, more business in government”, a staple of conservative propaganda since the 1920s, was, once again, being put to the test.

John Key had delivered, why not Christopher Luxon?

What the last five years have demonstrated, however, is that the slogan is fundamentally flawed. The argument that there should be less government in business is arguable. But the idea of inserting the ethos and methodology of business into government is ridiculous.

The government of a country is very different from the government of a corporation. Both are political, but they are political in very different ways.

A corporation operates on strictly hierarchical principles, with authority flowing from top to bottom through command and control structures reflexively intolerant of insubordination. A corporate chief executive makes decisions in the expectation that they will be implemented efficiently and effectively. If they are not, then the CE will want to know why.

But corporate governance, limited in scope and narrowly focused on the production and delivery of specific goods and services, is ill-suited to the sprawling and often contradictory responsibilities attached to governing a country – especially a democratic country.

The poorly performing division of a corporation can be sold off or closed down. That is not an option when the poor performer in question is the region of a nation. In cases of regional decline, improvement is seldom simple and neglect can be dangerous.

When it’s the population of an entire country that’s struggling, the complexities of government are multiplied one-hundred-fold. The raw material of business is real estate and machinery. The wherewithal of politics is living breathing human-beings.

Men, women and children are not amenable to liquidation. To paraphrase the German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht: a prime minister cannot simply dismiss the population and employ a new one.

John Key was an adroit political leader who won three general elections on the trot for National. He may have been a multi-millionaire, but he was not a businessperson – at least not in the same way that Luxon is a businessperson.

First and foremost, Key was a trader, and traders have to take account of much more than a single corporate balance-sheet. Traders smell opportunity and failure long before they appear in a CFO’s report. The trader’s perspective, like that of the successful political leader’s, needs to be high and wide enough to anticipate the evolution of events.

In both business and politics, narrowness of vision is an invitation to loss, not profit. Traders and prime ministers have to be able to read people’s minds and see around corners.

Effective political leadership is part art, part science. Unfortunately for the Coalition Government, Christopher Luxon is neither an artist nor a scientist. While all those around him are playing chess, he insists on playing draughts.

After five years in the job, why has Luxon yet to master the rules of the game?

In large part the fault lies in the constitution foisted upon the National Party following its worst ever electoral defeat in 2002.

When set against Bill English’s 2002 Party Vote of 21 percent, the latest Taxpayers’ Union/Curia Research poll, which has the Luxon-led National Party at 28 percent, looks positively healthy!

Commissioned to design a party organisation that reflected the realities of twenty-first century electoral politics in New Zealand, Steven Joyce opted to sweep away the empowering party structures created in the late-1930s to ensure that National could compete successfully against Labour’s 50,000-strong party organisation.

Joyce’s new constitution reflected the depressing realities of contemporary party politics. The dramatic economic and social changes ushered in by Roger Douglas, Ruth Richardson and Bill Birch between 1984 and 1993 caused tens-of-thousands of unimpressed Labour and National members to vote with their feet.

The days of mass parties were over.

The promoters and defenders of the new economic and social order welcomed this decisive break with the mass-membership traditions of the past, arguing instead for a radical downsizing and professionalisation of their respective parties.

In National’s case this was achieved by giving the party a corporate, top-down, organisational structure overseen by a board of directors thickly padded against the ravages of membership interference.

The weaknesses inherent in Joyce’s streamlined National Party, now almost entirely dependent on professional opinion pollsters and focus groups, were masked initially by Key’s impressive succession of electoral victories.

The growing distance between the governors and the governed, driven by the dramatic narrowing of policy choices demanded by the neoliberal orthodoxy entrenched in both major parties, mattered less when their leaders possessed political antennae attuned to the limits of their respective voters’ ideological tolerance.

Absent Helen Clark’s and John Key’s antennae, however, the leaders of Labour and National soon found themselves dangerously far out over their skis.

Luxon’s misfortune was to arrive in the top job almost entirely innocent of the deep fissures scarring New Zealand’s political landscape. He was parachuted into a party that was very clearly modelled on the corporate structures he had only recently departed. The roiling factional brawls that preceded his elevation to National’s leadership Luxon likely attributed to a shameful lack of discipline, accentuated by poor people management. He was supremely confident that he would be able to straighten out his errant colleagues in record time.

Except, it wasn’t really his colleagues that constituted the problem. They were only reflecting the divisions afflicting the entire world since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09 and the jarring experiences of the Covid pandemic.

The neoliberal policies of the Luxon-led Coalition Government show scant acknowledgment of the stresses and strains they are generating. Throughout his prime ministership, Luxon has shown that he just does not “get” the grievances and obsessions of less fortunate New Zealanders.

No matter how many times the Prime Minister acknowledges those who are “doing it hard” the electoral effect is negligible. He simply cannot say it like he means it.

Luxon’s continuing failure to fire is frustrating his colleagues and driving down his party’s poll ratings. Inevitably, this has fuelled speculation that he might be persuaded, or forced, to relinquish National’s leadership.

But what would be the point? It’s not as if any of Luxon’s colleagues would steer a substantially different course from his own. Across both major parties there is scant evidence of new and original thinking. How long would it be before a change in National’s leadership was recognised by voters as no change at all?

The business of politics should not be the politics of business, but who among those New Zealand politicians with a realistic chance of becoming prime minister is willing to make that case?

*Chris Trotter has been writing and commenting professionally about New Zealand politics for more than 30 years. He writes a weekly column for interest.co.nz. His work may also be found at http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com.