Liam Hehir: Time to put up or shut up

National Party members deserve better than they're getting from some MPs.

There will always be MPs willing to destabilise their own party while lacking the courage to put their name to it. We have been watching them at work for months, and it is past time somebody said what most people in the National Party are already thinking.

It is almost certainly true that a smallish group of MPs have spent the better part of this year running a quiet campaign against Luxon. There are, no doubt, the usual collection of group chats involved with one or two designated MPs acting as go-betweens to an eager press. The result is a drip-feed of stories all carrying the same breathless implication: something is going to happen.

Then nothing does, so the cycle starts again.

The same MPs return to the same journalists with the same whispers, each time a little more desperate, each time a little more reckless, until the speculation itself becomes the story. At that point the damage is done regardless of whether a challenge ever materialises. The question is no longer whether Luxon is the best available leader but whether his own caucus thinks he is.

That is the gift these people keep giving to Chris Hipkins, free of charge, week after week.

By their own admission to the Herald this week, the complainers do not have an alternative leader. No figure around whom the caucus is rallying. No challenger with the numbers.

Is there a John Key-like figure of preternatural political talent waiting on the backbenches? Of course there isn’t. Nobody seriously believes that elevating any of the names in circulation would constitute a renewal. Nobody is making that case because the case cannot be made.

Leadership changes tend to succeed only when the replacement is already demonstrably more popular than the incumbent, or when the incumbent has become so irreparably toxic that almost anyone would do. Neither condition applies here.

What National is much more likely to get is a Liz Truss situation: a caucus that talked itself into believing that a change of personnel was a change of fortune, installed someone who had not been tested at the top and discovered very quickly that the problems did not leave with the old leader.

So what is on offer is not a better leader. It is merely a different one, with none of the known advantages the party now has and all of the new problems a mid-year coup would bring.

The names floated by journalists as potential leaders are Willis, Bishop and Stanford. They are all on the liberal side of the party and all three are capable ministers with plausible future claims on the leadership. Not one of them would be wise to act now.

If Luxon wins the election, they can serve and continue to build their credentials. If he loses, they can then contest the leadership from a position of strength rather than inheriting a divided caucus seven months before polling day. A leadership fight in an election year does not tend to produce Prime Ministers.

It is certainly true that National’s numbers are soft. The early March Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll had them at 28.4%, their worst result on that survey since it began. But the story those numbers tell is not the one being sold. National’s support has not evaporated. It has bled sideways, mostly to New Zealand First, which has hit 11% on the Roy Morgan survey.

That is a problem for National as a party. A serious one. It is not a position that the party has really ever found itself in before.

But it is not a problem for the coalition as a government. Elections under MMP are won by blocs, and the bloc holds. The most recent Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll, taken 1 and 2 April, had the centre-right on 65 projected seats, the centre-left on 55. The 1News-Verian poll from February told a similar story. Those are not the numbers of a government about to be turfed out.

In that context, where the government is not obviously facing oblivion, here is what Luxon brings to the table:

• He has won a general election; and
• He has spent three years managing the least philosophically and personally coherent coalition in recent memory. 

He has done this without a large mandate. National’s 2023 vote share was the second lowest of any party to win the most seats under MMP. He is not Bolger in 1990, inheriting a landslide, or Key in 2008, riding a wave. He ground out a result and he has governed with it.

If the caucus throws that away now, it gets nothing proven in return. A new leader with no mandate, no track record, a divided caucus, and an election months away.

We have watched this movie before, of course.

In May 2020, National rolled Simon Bridges for Todd Muller. The polls were bad, the leader was unpopular, something had to be done. Muller had 0.2% support as preferred Prime Minister when the caucus handed him the job. He lasted fifty-three days. Judith Collins took over and led the party to its second-worst result in history.

That is what a panic-driven leadership change in an election year actually looks like. Back then National was facing a historically popular Prime Minister buoyed by a once-in-a-generation pandemic response. The situation today is nothing like that.

I have been critical of this government and will continue to be. There are moments where ministers have been too passive and missed opportunities. And to be completely honest, Luxon’s strengths as a CEO-style Prime Minister are not tailor-made for maintaining popularity grinding economic conditions.

But frustrations and headwinds are not a substitute for arithmetic. There is nothing to suggest that changing leaders would retain all the existing votes National has while adding any others. If that information existed, it would be everywhere.

At the same time, this government has genuine structural reforms to its credit, reforms that will matter long after the current news cycle is forgotten.

And a switch to a Labour-Greens government is not, for those of us who believe in limited government, a neutral proposition. There has been a substantive change in direction, and the people most agitated about Luxon’s leadership do not appear to have spent much time thinking about what they would actually be delivering the country into if they were to do this foolish thing in this foolish way.

What strikes me about this whole episode is the presumed sense of entitlement on display. Too many MPs have convinced themselves they deserve more than they have received, that their self-perceived talents have gone unrecognised, that they would be flourishing if only the leadership were smarter or more attentive to their particular gifts.

Politics is full of people who peaked at selection spending years afterwards wondering why nobody has noticed how remarkable they are. The smarter of these read the room and move on. The harder cases are the ones who succeeded elsewhere and genuinely cannot fathom why the same ability, the same work ethic and the same attitude that made them a success in law or business or the public service has not translated into political success.

They are not deluded about their own talent. They are deluded about what politics actually rewards. If you’re stuck halfway up the cursus honorum, the temptation may be to conclude that the system is broken rather than that you are not the right fit for it.

But how does any of this help? What is the sense of trying to destabilise your leader when you don’t have a ready and willing alternative willing to confront the leader personally? Is the hope that a sitting Prime Minister will just see a news story in the paper and resign?

All of this is dispiriting for any number of MPs and candidates who are just getting on with it. They are the ones being undercut by this circus. They are the ones who deserve a functioning party machine behind them going into an election year. The anonymous briefers owe them an answer.

So here is what should happen on Tuesday.

Luxon should walk into that caucus room and ask the malcontents to say, in front of their colleagues, what they have been saying to journalists. Not through proxies. Not through background quotes. In the room, with their names attached.

The prime minister should do this with concessions prepared. No promises to be more consultative, more accessible or more collegial. That framing surrenders the initiative before he has even sat down and validates conduct that should not be validated. Invite the criticisms, then ask every person in that room to decide, there and then, whether they are in or out.

If the malcontents have the numbers for a confidence vote, call one. Clear the air.

If they do not have the numbers, then they need to decide whether it would be better for them to stand down at the next election. It is a decision that can be made in full awareness of the fact that the National Party existed long before any of them arrived in Parliament and it will exist long after they leave. There is nothing particularly indispensable about any of them.

The only question is whether they leave with some dignity or whether they are remembered as the people who made Chris Hipkins prime minister again but, this time, with Chloe Swarbrick as his deputy. Because while they may not have the power to roll the leader, they do have the power to tank the government with an unsustainable and weak hype cycle about the leadership that never ends.

National does not need a new leader. Not now. It does need less cowardice.

Liam Hehir is a lawyer and political commentator. This article was originally published on his Substack The Blue Review HERE.