Christopher Luxon is ditching some of his ties with Labour. Woop! Woop! National’s polling jumped up three points.
Last week, after 2½ years, Luxon said, “We got it wrong.” Allowing three houses up to three storeys high on most suburban sites had been acceptable. Building them close to the boundary of a single-storied home, towering over the next-door property, was promoted as a great way to provide new houses. Last week Luxon backtracked and said, “We got it wrong,” and the voters took note.
Luxon became leader of the National Party on 30 November 2021. The first shock of his leadership style came when he declared that his party would work with the government. He said he liked Jacinda and ordered his MPs to have a bipartisan approach with the Labour Party where possible. Only a couple of weeks into the job, Luxon was already laying down his cross-party ideology to his MPs, aligning his party with the worst Government New Zealand had ever experienced.
The new party leader said he wants to make politics a nicer place and he celebrated the crossbench success of the Housing Supply Bill.
That means working with the Government when the situation allows for it. There are moments where we’ll disagree very strongly, and oppose, but where it makes sense, and we can be constructive, we should be open to it. The passing of the Housing Supply Bill in Parliament last week is reflective of that.
It was a bipartisan approach taken by the Opposition and Labour under then leader Judith Collins that saw housing spokesperson (and now deputy leader) Nicola Willis work with Housing Minister Megan Woods to write legislation.
We know home ownership is important and we know we have a housing crisis. We know we need to build more houses in a long and enduring way and expand and densify our cities. Us stepping up to the plate and working in good faith with the Government is different, but very necessary.… We ended up with a good bill. People will criticise us for that, but fundamentally we’re either solving a housing crisis in this country or we’re not, he said.
To work in a bipartisan way is a good example of what could be possible.
Newsroom 20.12.21
Big mistake. Some councils refused to go along with it. Other councils criticised the law over concerns it would ruin suburban character, reduce valuations, cause friction between neighbours or block out the sun and existing views. National just annoyed people by being a party to this. It’s never has been the Kiwi way to deliberately block out a neighbour’s sunlight. There are resource consent laws to prevent that from happening. Luxon has now back-pedalled and given councils the right to make their own housing decisions.
While conservative voters generally vote National and Act, it is evident that many are still furious with these parties. In 2022 many concerned New Zealanders took to the roads in convoys to Parliament, simply wanting the Government to hear their plight. The government that enforced the Covid -19 draconian restrictions chose to avoid them. The ultimate indignity occurred however, when National and Act, the opposition parties, strongly supported the cruel government mandates.
The callous dismissal of the misery caused by this Labour Government and backed by the National party is unfathomable as the human tragedy unfolded and the damage experienced was massive!
Is a solo mum going to look favourably on Luxon as a leader, knowing he couldn’t care less about her? She studied to get a master’s degree while working and being a busy mum running a household. It gets personal and raw. Although her GP said she must not have the jab, due to anaphylaxis, she was denied a vaccine exemption by Bloomfield, causing huge stress. Being forced out of the job she loves and losing all her income was incredibly traumatising.
On top of that trauma, she had to support her seriously vaccine-injured teenage son who developed painful blisters from top to bottom along with a racing heart after the Covid-19 jab and was hospitalised for weeks. NZ doctors could not agree that the illness was anything to do with the vaccine. Pictures were sent to USA doctors who confirmed it was. He has now developed an inflammatory bowel condition.
There is little wonder she is furious, sad and disillusioned with politicians. Neither she nor her son should have been pressured to be vaccinated.
Luxon slowly began to speak out against Labour’s ruthless Covid policy, stating months after people were forced out of employment that the vaccine mandates should end – soon! It was too late. The damage had been done to his reputation as the new leader.
Luxon has never admitted ‘we got this wrong’ to the 500-plus nurses, 50 doctors, 20 school principals, 2000 teachers and 7000 educators who were mandated out of their jobs. Most health and education authorities still refuse to reemploy the unvaccinated. Supporting Labour’s harsh programme has cost National dearly.
What else may Luxon ditch? Giving crown land to Maori, the Hauraki Marine Park, the Ngai Tahu Representation Bill and the assigned veto power that Maori have with co-governance?
Retiring National MP Todd Muller said the highlight of his time in Parliament was his cross-party work on net zero climate action with Green Party co-leader James Shaw. Luxon’s intransigent position on climate is possibly something he brought across from Unilever, where he worked with Sir Jonathon Porritt, the British environmentalist and writer. Porritt’s website says that since 2010 Unilever has had “the most wide ranging, imaginative and ambitious corporate sustainability initiative that we know of”.
Someone perhaps needs to alert Luxon that a few days ago Macron may have hit the pause button on net zero, declaring France has gone far enough in the pursuit of net zero, calling for a ‘regulatory pause’ on green issues in order to push for the “reindustrialisation” of his country, much to the rage of the left. Does Luxon still say his passion for climate change action is more than a rebranding exercise for National, it’s a life issue?
Or will he ditch that insane policy and voila, see the polls rise again?
