Shane Te Pou: Time for our Koru Club Prime Minister to deliver

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Prime Minister Christopher Luxon taking part in a women’s rugby event at a stadium in Nuku’alofa, Tonga while at the Pacific Islands Forum. Photo / Adam Pearse
THREE KEY FACTS
Shane Te Pou (Ngāi Tūhoe) is a commentator, blogger and former Labour Party activist.
OPINION

In a speech to Bloomberg last week, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon told the audience he’s “spent much of this year on the road [overseas] making the case for
New Zealand as a destination for capital investment and as a trusted partner for security and trade”.

But he didn’t list a single outcome of any of his international visits.
For a man who loves KPIs and even listed the school cellphone ban as one of his economic policies in the same speech, the lack of any international achievements stood out like a sore thumb.
Luxon casts himself as the country’s head of sales, “hustling” he calls it. By my count, he’s spent more than 25 days overseas so far this year.
But what, exactly, has he achieved in any of these international trips on the taxpayer dime?
What new markets have been opened up? Lots of red carpets and banquet dinners, but little else.
Before the election, Luxon said a free trade agreement (FTA) with India was top priority. He would get it done.
With typical diplomacy, Luxon dismissed the businesspeople who had accompanied earlier Prime Ministerial trips as “C-Listers” and “tagalongs”. He refused to listen when business leaders asked him to stop bagging New Zealand in his speeches overseas.
Labour got the EU FTA, the UK FTA, RCEP, PACER Plus and the CPTPP over the line – but he would do better. Luxon was going to show us how a salesman gets things done.
A year later, the promised agreement with India hasn’t made any discernible progress. Luxon hasn’t even been able to lock in a date to visit India.
Ironically, the one trade gain the Government has made – the deal with the UAE (our 19th-largest trade partner) – has nothing to do with any of Luxon’s trips.
For all the bragging, he’s come away empty-handed.
Instead, he’s been traipsing around on increasingly low-energy tours. Smaller and smaller business delegations. Doing TikToks of himself outside landmarks. Mouthing platitudes about “incredible potential” without ever delivering on it.
Visiting South Korea, he didn’t even discuss the ferry fiasco with anyone. The biggest trade issue between our two countries, possibly ever, and he wasn’t up for talking about it with the Koreans.
In his meeting with the South Korean President, all he could think of to mention was New Zealanders’ knowledge of K-Pop and Squid Game.
Good for the Airpoints balance, no doubt. Good for the ego, too – all those red carpets and banquets. And perhaps that’s what Luxon sees as the central perk of being Prime Minister – being treated to pomp and ceremony.
But isn’t it about time our Koru Club PM showed us some deliverables?
Because it’s not like all this time overseas comes free. And I’m not just talking airfares.
The price of a PM who’s always overseas is that he’s noticeably not across the details of what his Government is up to. When he’s asked a question about major issues (in one of his increasingly infrequent media standups), his stock answer is “you’ll have to ask Minister so-and-so about that”. Or he repeats lines he’s learned by rote and dodgy statistics that have already been called out.
A Prime Minister who spent more time running the country and less in business class would have had underperforming ministers like Shane Reti, Nicole McKee, Casey Costello, Chris Penk, Louise Upston, Mark Mitchell, Andrew Hoggard, Nicola Willis and Erica Stanford in his office by now, hauled them across the coals, if not demoted or sacked them altogether. Instead, they’re being allowed to run wild.
Meanwhile, big issues like the Cook Strait ferries, emission reductions and an actual plan to get out of an economic slump are left unresolved because the guy whose job it is to pull ministers together and hammer out positions isn’t there to do it.
A Government of three quite divergent parties was always going to require careful management. Instead, we’ve effectively got three parallel mini-governments that barely talk to each other.
If it doesn’t seem like the left hand knows what the right hand is doing in this Government, it’s because, half the time, the head is 35,000 feet above the Pacific, on his way to another round of light meetings.
Maybe that’s another attraction in overseas travel for the PM. When he’s away, he doesn’t have to deal with trying to keep David Seymour and Winston Peters from each other’s throats, or impotently ask them to pull their ministers into line.
Overseas, he gets to hobnob with VIPs and no one asks hard questions.
I’ve got no doubt Luxon will find reasons to spend as much time, if not more, overseas next year.
But would it be too much to ask that, if he’s going to keep on talking up his “hustle”, he starts bringing home the bacon.
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