New jobs are always hard, but most people get a day or two to find out just how bad they are going to be. As Christopher Luxon was sworn in as New Zealand’s new prime minister last week, his government was already deep in the throes of its first communications crisis.
The new governing coalition of three rightwing parties had agreed, at the reported insistence of the two smaller ones, to scrap a series of hardline anti-smoking measures the previous government had been planning, including controls on how many stores could sell tobacco and a rising legal age of purchase that would mean children born after 2009 would never be able to buy cigarettes.
The problem was not so much the policy change itself, but the way the government had allowed it to be painted – as a way to pay for tax cuts, creating an image of themselves as rightwing boogeymen without any help from their opponents. Cigarettes incur a hefty excise tax in New Zealand, bringing the government around $2bn in revenue that would taper off if people did stop smoking.
National’s incoming finance spokesperson Nicola Willis had proactively brought up the changes to the smoke-free laws as a way to gain back that revenue in an interview focused on the tax cuts, and the media had quite naturally picked up this idea and ran with it. Public finances are usually extremely hard things to write interesting headlines about, and a lot of the other changes the new government were making concerned the complexities of tax deductions for landlords. Much easier to just write about how allowing the country to keep smoking a lot of cancer-causing ciggies would pay for the middle classes to get tax cuts.
Luxon tried to put this one back in the box and make the much more palatable and strong argument that heavy-handed regulation would create a black market, but he screwed this up by getting his figures completely wrong, arguing the huge area of Northland would be restricted to just one tobacco store, when it would actually be restricted to 35.
None of this was helped by his new deputy prime minister Winston Peters using the swearing-in ceremony as a stage for intimidating the state broadcasters into using less of the native Māori language, as well as making a baseless accusation that the media had been bribed. Hard to expect friendly interviews after that.
And after years of attacking the public service the new government can hardly be surprised that those within it will be on the lookout for chances to embarrass them. Already, someone has leaked a cabinet paper about the government’s push to repeal fair pay legislation before Christmas, exposing the fact that the new minister, Brooke van Velden, had not in fact consulted the unions over this, as she reportedly had told cabinet.
These kinds of errors are hardly surprising. In opposition you can often get away with making statements based on hearsay or little evidence, with occasional corrections from the media, but not the days of opprobrium a minister can expect if they get a fact completely wrong.
Jacinda Ardern’s government had more than its fair share of silly missteps in its first months, and Ardern failed to seriously discipline Peters when he attacked a journalist looking into his party’s finances with secretly taken photos of him. She managed a massive win in 2020 and there is no evidence from this first week that suggests Luxon won’t win in 2026 – three years is a long time and he enough to learn from these mistakes, while the immediate inflationary pressure currently hurting New Zealanders is likely to be somewhere in the rear view mirror by then. With a bit of work, governments can set the political weather by taking the initiative, and by responding adeptly to crises.
Yet there is a real risk for Luxon inbuilt into his coalition agreement. The three parties have plenty of ideological overlap, but the main things they agree on are undoing various Labour party policies. This makes for a fairly unexciting “first 100 days” of repeals, not building much new, with the political “reward” for voters of a tax cut not coming until the middle of the 2024. At a certain point Luxon will need to make clear that he got into politics to do more than undo things. If he doesn’t there will be many more weeks like the last one.
