Chris Luxon as new party leader is the right outcome for the National Party.
On paper, he was their best option.
He’s kept his head down so he’s got none of the dirty politics baggage that too many others, in that party, have.
He’s got a strong selling point already: his impressive CV. He ran Air New Zealand for six years. Before that, he was President and Chief Executive Officer at Unilever Canada.
I totally accept that just because he’s good at business does not mean that he’ll be good at politics.
Just because someone’s a great surgeon does not mean they’ll be a great mechanic.
But it means he’s got real world business experience he can point to, which is hell of a lot more than almost everyone in the Labour Party cabinet can claim.
He seems to be taking a similar, business-like approach to politics.
I hope he won't mind me telling you this story but the night before the election last year I was at a party and he was there too. There, he told me he’d been studying all the National party cabinets going back, I think, to the mid 1970s because he wanted to understand what made a cabinet good at running government.
That's impressive because it showed he wasn’t planning to luck in and see how it goes. He was already planning on how to do it well.
I’m not predicting that he’ll necessarily be a success. I loathe to make predictions because of what we’ve seen from so many promising politicians in the past, more recent Muller and Collins. You can never really pick whether someone will nail it or fail it.
But based on Luxon's CV and his aptitude, I’d say the Nat’s ended up with the best of the options they had.
Heather du Plessis-Allan is a journalist and commentator who hosts Newstalk ZB's Drive show.
4 comments:
Pretty simple really for an ex- National voter (from the last two elections) like myself. The leader has nothing to do with it. It's the policies that need to change.
Let's face it ACT have done the hard yards to date. Pity David Seymour appears to have strayed a little off course and become a bit authoritarian. Hey, he appears capable of reading the room a bit better than National though so he might get back on track.
The real question is will he maintain the status quo or oppose the move to Maori rule.
A nice little xmas present, there is now light at the end of the tunnel.Its going to be good fun watching Ardern and Robertson go down the dipper in the poles, but how much are they going to spend to buy an election?
gregd,they will spend whatever it takes. It's not their money.
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