Newsflash: PM Christopher Luxon does not take any responsibility for the condition in which the New Zealand economy currently finds itself. Not his problem. He’s done his bit. At a meeting in Rotorua on the weekend Luxon criticised employers for their alleged ‘parent child” relationship to the state. Allegedly, firms need to become “adult, adult, adult” and expect a lot less from central government.
According to Luxon, employers just need to get on with it, like he did in the six years he worked for Unilever in Chicago. Allegedly, heroic foreign firms don’t waste any time worrying about what central government is thinking or doing. Luxon’s claim will come as a surprise to Unilever, which -reportedly – has been spending huge amounts of money this year on lobbying efforts to influence what the law-makers in Washington think and do about a major merger that Unilever has in mind. Hey, no-one tells Christopher anything.
Luxon’s patronising lecture was in response to a mild observation by the Rotorua meeting chair that firms are currently in a situation where if they raise prices to recoup their rising costs, even fewer customers will be coming through their doors. To Luxon this problem – like all the problems facing business – can be remedied by a dose of positive thinking and an infusion of AI. To show the meeting what a cool, switched-on dude he was, Luxon even called for a show of hands as to how many of those present were using “Claude, or Claude code.” I guess Luxon hasn’t caught up with this news item. Or with this trend.
Chinese AI models are already gaining traction among Western companies as they close the performance gap with U.S. rivals and remain cheaper to use than the most advanced offerings from American labs. U.S. lawmakers are considering how to curb the growing adoption of Chinese AI models by homegrown companies.
Why is Luxon choosing to throw employers under the bus? Well, we’re four months out from the election. The guy who promised to fix the economy has to quickly find someone else – Donald Trump, sad sack employers etc – to blame for that failure. Later this week, labour force figures are expected to show that the unemployment rate is climbing even higher. Average wage growth has also stalled at 2%, well below the inflation rate. Business liquidations are still running at abnormally high levels and – alarm bells! – most of the sharp rise in business failures over the term of the Luxon government have been occurring in Auckland, Ground Zero for the governments’ economic orthodoxy:
The number of new insolvency proceedings continues to rise, with 2025 seeing an increase of 9.7% from the prior year. Since 2023, the majority of new insolvency proceedings have been filed in Auckland.
In Rotorua, Luxon tried to distance himself from these losers. Clearly, they didn’t have the right mindset. The High Court in its annual report on insolvencies has begged to differ:
In the High Court’s Annual Report, Associate Judge Lester noted that the “tight economic conditions which have existed in recent years mean the number of applications for company liquidations and bankruptcies continue to increase.”
In its infinite wisdom, it was the Luxon government that chose to impose and maintain tight economic conditions in the middle of a recession. Ask the hospitality industry in Wellington whether central government’s decision to fire thousands of their customers in the trough of a recession was a good idea. Employers, workers, voters in general have every right to expect more from Christopher Luxon than a TED talk about motivation.
Old man loses temper, rails at China
Sometimes the simplest explanation is the correct one. A cranky old guy is needled by a young whippersnapper, loses his rag and resorts to racist abuse. True, it raises the ante when the spluttering senior happens to be Foreign Minister Winston Peters, the target of his abuse happens to be a NZ citizen and fellow MP, and the racist slurs are being directed at this country’s chief trading partner.
Cleary, racist slurs are no longer a barrier to holding a ministerial warrant within a Luxon Cabinet. If they were, Shane Jones would have been gone long ago. While Mr Speaker apparently has a very low tolerance for protest expressions by tangata whenua, the Speaker appears happy to operate a far more lenient policy when it comes to government MPs directing racist slurs at MPs with a diverse cultural heritage. Suggestion: New Zealand is a multicultural society. So why doesn’t Mr. Speaker issue a ruling that “go back to where you came from” is no longer an acceptable term in our Parliament?
For his part, PM Christopher Luxon has framed the incident as an attention-seeking “game” on Peters’ part and one that he, Luxon, was not going to indulge. Right. But it wasn’t a “game” for Lawrence Xu- Nan, who was doing his job of holding the government to account. That’s the trouble with reducing moral standards to a power gambit. It doesn’t seem to occur to Luxon that his team’s standards of behaviour need to rise above what the consequences might be if he ever bothered to enforce them. In that climate, where do you draw the line, if at all?
The China syndrome
Racism aside, it was interesting that Peters seemed to be incensed that the Chinese allegedly “lie like flatfish.” Hello? Can Peters really be surprised that the hints and assurances conveyed to him on the cocktail party circuit should not always be taken at face value? I thought diplomacy was supposed to be the art of lying in the national interest.
But hold on. Peters is this country’s top diplomat. So when he calls the Chinese liars, is Peters himself lying? (The ancient Greeks were aware of the paradox.) Hmm. At the very least, do we have a Foreign Minister so credulous that he expects foreign powers to speak only the bare, unvarnished truth to him?
If so, what does Peters make of Donald Trump who reportedly promised on 37 separate occasions that an Iran ceasefire was imminent, before that ceasefire – briefly – came to pass. If the Chinese are somehow managing to be even worse liars than Trump, when will Peters wise up, and not let them lead him up the garden path?
The one upside of this sorry episode is that it should finally explode the myth that Winston Peters – for all his obsessions and mood swings here at home – is a consummate diplomat abroad, impressing all and sundry – Condoleeza Rice! – with his saturnine charm and his canny expertise. MFAT has been happy to peddle this myth, and in return Peters looks after MFAT pay and conditions more assiduously than some of his recent predecessors.
But it is, and always has been, a myth. Calling the Chinese liars in public is all the proof needed that it is well past the time for Winston Peters to be put out to pasture.
About Birds and Molluscs
David Attenborough is not replaceable, but when the job of World’s Most Likeable Naturalist finally becomes vacant, I’d like to nominate Jonathan Meiburg for the position. Meiburg studied science but gave it away to become an indie musician, initially in Okkervil River and more recently in Loma. (Any excuse to replay this Loma video.)
Last week, Meiburg released The New World, the 11th album he has issued under the name Shearwater, which also happens to be the family name of the wonderful (and critically endangered) New Zealand seabird, the Hutton’s Shearwater.
That’s one life. Meiburg’s other life is as a naturalist. In 2021, he wrote and published A Most Remarkable Creature, an engrossing, exciting book about the habits and history of a migratory bird of prey called the caracara. In family variants, the caracara ranges from the Falklands Islands to Texas, and I can’ recommend Meiburg’s book about this intelligent, endlessly inquisitive creature too highly.
For now, the official video for the new Shearwater single “Slugs In The Marigolds” has Meiburg finding a mollusc in his garden and taking it for a walk/bus ride/ferry ride to the ocean, before returning it to its natural habitat.
Finally, Meiburg has a new book on the horizon. Reportedly, this one is about the natural wonders of Antarctica, and its perilous future. The video for ‘Daydream Unbeliever” portrays the process of disintegration evident in the Weddell Sea.