Duncan Garner: Luxon’s flopped by failing to win hearts and minds
Polls nor economic recovery are going Christopher Luxon's way right now. Photo / Getty Images
What goes up must come down, but in Christopher Luxon’s case, what didn’t go up very far needed to go further, and now it’s coming back down it won’t take long before it’s all over.
I think Luxon’s popularity, if you can call it that, has peaked – and if he had a honeymoon, I, like most of the country, must have missed it.
The Post/Freshwater Strategypoll released this week showed if an election was held now, it would be a hung Parliament – no one side would win – and crucially, Labour leader Chris Hipkins has nudged ahead of Luxon as preferred PM.
The poll shows National slipping four points since the October 2023 election to 34% and Labour gaining four points to 31%. It’s a poll that puts pressure on Luxon and asks: is National’s plan getting us anywhere and is he the right man to lead his party and the country?
Luxon says the poll is not what National’s internal polling shows and that people are better off under his leadership and the National-led government. To be fair, inflation has dived since December 2022 and interest rates are now falling.
But who is suddenly feeling better off? These people are hard to find and all economic forecasts now suggest growth will be weaker in the short term. More than 8000 people joined the dole queue in the three months to September and unemployment is set to rise further. The nationwide unemployment rate of 4.8% is the highest since December 2020 and it is forecast to rise to 5.2% next year. Others have had their hours scaled back.
If he had a honeymoon, I, like most of the country, must have missed it.
All this builds pressure on Luxon’s leadership and the coalition he leads because National had promised a strong recovery if it was voted in, not an extension of the cost-of-living and post-Covid pain that saw voters desert Labour.
Despite Luxon wanting voters to believe the current malaise is the lag effect from Labour, it’s not credible. Not when he takes credit for inflation and interest rates falling - which is actually the job of the Reserve Bank, as most people know.
So, rather than the change voters wanted, Luxon’s government has instead delivered more of the same and then some. The softening in interest rates is yet to properly flow through to households and may not begin to do so until March, when a big chunk of fixed-rate mortgages come up for renewal. Meanwhile, as ordinary Kiwis fret about mortgage costs – and whether they’ll have to sell their homes if they lose their jobs - Luxon is selling his surplus investment houses and properties, one by one by one, and seeing it roll out, headline after headline, in public.
Did anyone suggest he should leave it until after he leaves office? If they didn’t, they should have. If he was told, he didn’t listen and that means his political radar is simply way off. Why? Because all those tax-free gains are being thrown in front of us at a time of struggle for many and when a capital gains tax is once again being debated.