Cam Slater: Perhaps It Is Time We Treat Our Country Like a Company

There has been much criticism in the past week about Christopher Luxon and his ministers talking about New Zealand as though it were a company. Personally I think that is exactly how we should view New Zealand.

If we are to have loads of nice-to-have things, often called a welfare state, then somehow you have to pay for it all. Labour, the Greens and the Maori Party seem to think that you can have all those things and pay for it all by borrowing billions upon billions.

The problem with doing that is eventually you have to pay it all back.

Heather du Plessis Allan has had a think about this too:

NZ’s CEO Christopher Luxon was on a roll this week.

He put out his second quarterly “Action Plan for New Zealand”. It was a list of 36 “action points” he expects his team of ministers to deliver by June 30.

He got some grief for it.

It was full of easy wins. It’s really not that hard to “take decisions”. That accounted for more than a third of the action points.

It’s hard to measure Action Point 18?s pledge to “raise the energy” New Zealand brings to key international relationships.

It would be a massive fail if his Finance Minister didn’t deliver on Action Point 1, “deliver a budget”.

But Luxon didn’t let the critics dissuade him.

His approach is deliberate.

He’s intentionally, he said on the radio, taking a big decision and “chunking it down”. Once that smaller decision is taken, it means he can “ladder up” to the bigger one. That is called, I gather, going “through the gates of implementation”.

Luxon is already famous for loving a bit of corporate jargon, but this week he gave us an especially big double-helping of it.

Labour and the Greens hated it. A country is not a company, they wailed, and a Prime Minister is not a CEO.

NZ Herald

Our country has an annual GDP of around US$249 billion, there are twenty-two companies in the world with more revenue than that. So, whilst the statement is kind of a truism, it really isn’t. We are smaller than twenty-two companies. Twenty of those companies are in the USA.

So, we are a large company, and so perhaps we should emulate some of those companies.

For example; Walmart, the largest company by revenue in the world, earns US$291,090 per worker. Think about that this way, if every taxpayer in New Zealand paid $291,000 in tax imagine how much they earned before tax!

But the more they protested, the more they reminded voters that our current Prime Minister was a CEO, which actually doesn’t feel like a particularly bad skill set to have right now given that we’re in a double-dip recession and so short on money we’re having to fire public servants.

Frankly, this corporate stuff is working for Luxon. If I was him I’d ignore absolutely everybody – friends and critics alike – and double-down on being the Prime Manager of New Zealand.

NZ Herald

Exactly. Compare Christopher Luxon’s management skills to those of Chris Hipkins, or his finance skills to those of Grant Robertson… it’s no contest.

Who would you rather run the country? And wouldn’t you rather they ran the country like a company than a socialist basket case?

Sure, the quarterly plans will start to wear thin if they’re too packed with easy wins and don’t get around to “delivering the deliverables” (Luxon actually said that phrase once). And sure, there are plenty of people who will have no idea what “chunking it down” means given that we learned from Jacinda Ardern there are some voters who need to be talked to like preschoolers.

But every time Luxon rolls out a sometimes-incomprehensible corporate phrase it reminds us that he’s the business guy. That’s his biggest point of difference with the big-spending-money-ain’t-no-thing previous Labour government and he should drive home as much as possible.

I feel obliged to point out I am in a minority with this view. Bar two people, almost everyone I know disagrees with me.

Someone who is an expert in this stuff told me in no uncertain terms this week that I’m wrong and the corporate jargon doesn’t work because people can’t understand it and, case in point, John Key didn’t talk like that and look at how popular he was. But Luxon isn’t John Key. And he will probably never be that popular.

NZ Herald

No, he’s not that popular, but if he can turn around the economy and make this place what it has the potential to be then he will become very popular.

If only John Key had used his popularity to actually do something good for the country, imagine how much better off we’d be. Instead, he sold us out to Maori interests, signed UNDRIP, and tried to change the flag. None of that made us more resilient as a nation.

Hell’s teeth, Robert Muldoon built more in his nine years than any government since. Almost all of Muldoon’s Think Big projects have benefitted the country immeasurably, and made us more resilient as a nation, only for the last mob to destroy that legacy by shuttering Marsden Point and destroying the oil and gas industry.

Luxon is sitting on a popularity rating of 25 per cent. That’s a shocker.

With a rating like that this early in his term, there’s a good chance he’ll actually never be loved. But he can still be respected, most likely for knowing what he’s doing with finances.

Of course, his strongest asset is also his greatest risk. CEO are not famous for their empathy. They’re famous for being ruthless.

If the public mood changes on any of the tough decisions being taken – the public service cuts, the crackdown on unruly state house tenants, the lifting of expectations of beneficiaries – he could go from the guy who knows money to the guy who doesn’t care about people.

It’s a risk. The Opposition knows it. That’s why they’ve started the company vs country narrative.

But frankly this is who Luxon is. It’s about the only thing he’s got. It’s also not as if he’s going to charm us into voting for him.

If he’s not going to be loved for being a Prime Minister – and I don’t think he is – he may as well be respected for being a Prime Manager.

NZ Herald

I’m pretty sure most people are cheering the Government on as they swing the axe in the public service. The public mood is not going to turn against the Government either if they do wallop bad state house tenants and start locking crims up.

The Opposition is quietly imploding. Sources inside Labour say Hipkins has checked out, as soon as he can find a soft landing he’s off. Robbo has already bailed, and the rest don’t want to step up because they know they’ll also lose the next election. The Greens are slowly self-destructing too as they get more strange and radical, and the Maori Party are just a bunch of idiot racists.

All Luxon has to do is get some decent comms training, learn to speak without as much jargon, stop talking down to us through his silly Tiktok videos and concentrate on extracting as much out of his ministers as humanly possible. The time for competent management is now, we’ve had six years of an inept-ocracy, and we don’t want any more of that nonsense.

Cam Slater is a New Zealand-based blogger, best known for his role in Dirty Politics and publishing the Whale Oil Beef Hooked blog, which operated from 2005 until it closed in 2019. Cam blogs regularly on the BFD - where this article was sourced.