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Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
Last week, you heard Luxon cutting the youth jobseeker benefit with the now immortal line, “If you want a job, go where the jobs are.” Which is, as Chippie rightly said, why 201 people leave NZ every day. Plus other bon mots such as, “get off your ass and stop playing Playstation.”
In his head, I think he’s doing the whole tough guy bit. In his head, he’s the love child of Margaret Thatcher and Clint Eastwood. In reality, he comes off like Marie Antoinette.
All he did was prove, once again, how out of touch he is.
In any normal context, telling someone to get off the benefit and get a job fruit picking sounds glib at best (not to mention, ill fated after a similar scheme failed in 2021). But in the last month alone, Tokoroa lost almost 120 jobs at its plywood plant (off the back of the earlier closure of the paper mill). Watties is dropping Hawke’s Bay peaches, Auckland’s IKEA gets 25,000 applications for 500 jobs, unemployment is at its highest since 2020, and no one’s spending because they’re terrified their job is next.
In this context, it’s not just clumsy. It’s completely out of touch with reality. And, to those of us up at 3am doomscrolling on Seek, it sounds like a total middle finger.
Whatever he intended, it sounds like he’s shrugging and saying, “I know I’ve completely failed to fix the economy, create conditions for growth, everyone’s losing their small business and juice bars are getting hundreds of applications for one spot… but hey, if you don’t like it, move!”
(After all, it’s not just youth who are currently unemployed. Everyone who just lost a job because the mill closed, or the small business they own goes under, is listening too).
You can forgive that kind of gobsmackingly tone deafness once. But he used all of that goodwill up in 2024, when he told a broke, exhausted nation in recession that he was “wealthy and sorted”. Then capped off the insensitivity with telling parents of poor kids that if they didn’t like the prison slop on offer in schools, make a Marmite sandwich.
Saying something like that was unbelievable.
But now it’s clear he’s not just making dumb gaffes. He just does not get it.
[…] What’s really interesting is I don’t know if he knows how furious he’s made people.
[..] He’s a dead man walking. He’s achieved the unenviable position of being distrusted just as much as Hipkins is (albeit for very different reasons, because Chippie suffers – somewhat unfairly – from guilt by association with the Covid era). And, whatever happens with interest rates, I don’t think it’ll be enough to resurrect him. He’s pissed too many people off.
If you want my bet, in 2026 we’ll turn away from Luxon’s National with the same venom we did for 2023’s Labour. But we won’t go Red. We’ll run into the waiting arms of the minor parties.
And then, who wins? Well. It's the man who always wins. Winston The Immortal will rise again to anoint a new Ruler of the Iron Throne. And all bets really are off at that point.
So at least we have some hope.
So if I was Luxon, I’d get out now. Run to America to do an international speaker tour and let Chris Bishop and Erica Stanford take it from here. National would probably scrape in if they did that. But I don’t think he will.
He’ll stay there, and lead National to the guillotine.
I’d go out on limb and say Luxon is the worse National PM we’ve ever had. And yes, even worse than Muldoon. At least Muldoon had personality.
Luxon strikes me as the kind of boss that would be hell to work for. You know: the kind that smiles at you and says ‘I’d just like a talk in my office’ and then proceed to stab you in the chest a hundred times. The kind of boss that will make half his staff redundant, make the rest do twice the work and then claim he’s turned the company around by making smart strategic decisions.
Oh, and speaking of performance, under his own rules shouldn’t Luxon have resigned by now?
But Verity is right. I’ve never known a PM to be this out of touch. He just doesn’t get it.
In fact, if it ever turned out that Luxon was actually a Labour plant, I would say ‘Well that explains everything.’
