It’s not looking good when Matthew Hooton and Tova O’Brien are openly writing Luxon off after a terrible week of self mutilating blunders in the media as Luxon has lurched from u-turn to back pedalling to u-turn again…
TOVA:Luxon’s recent missteps show signs he wasn’t quite ready for National’s top job
Now after a string of missteps and miscommunication you gotta wonder, did he go too soon? Does Christopher Luxon lack the political experience to pull this off and become Prime Minister?
HOOTON: Christopher Luxon is the best National’s got, but he’s no John Key
Concerns are growing in the business community and in his own party about whether National leader Christopher Luxon is quite up to it.
…I think there has been an enormous political blunder by Luxon’s team.
He is good at the 30-45second sound bite on 5minute morning radio and Breakfast TV interviews and he comes across fairly slick in those 30-45seconds, but a 20minute live TV interview with Jack Tame?
Come on!
Luxon wasn’t ready!
And let’s not put up with any ‘Jack was being a bully’ crap! Jack is a very straight broadcaster, very smart and very well researched, if you can’t front foot it with Jack, you shouldn’t be stepping up!
Jack is an excellent broadcaster and pushes for answers Luxon should have effortlessly had.
The fundamental problem for every right wing politician selling tax cuts is the following: Average Punter asks how much they are getting in tax cuts, and under National that’s $850 per year, and then they ask the politician trying to sell the tax cut how much they are getting, and in Luxon’s case it will be $18000 and average punters say fuck off – the poor aren’t stupid!
That’s why none of this makes sense, because shifting the tax bracket should be a vote winner for National. It’s not a tax cut, it’s allowing hard working Kiwis to keep more of the pittance they earn! But by refusing to rule out scrapping the top tax rate, it becomes a de facto tax cut issue.
The solution to this is all so obvious and again screams questions about Luxon’s team.
The automatic inoculation of the criticism of Luxon getting $18000 in a tax cut, is an announcement by Chris that he intends to donate that full $18000 to a charity!
That way the criticism is void and it makes Luxon look magnanimous and charitable.
He bewilderingly told Jack he didn’t ‘need’ the $18000 (which in of itself is a red flag), so why not donate it to charity?
That this obvious means to shut down that criticism while building Luxon’s reputation wasn’t employed from the start suggests a team that isn’t playing 3 moves ahead.
Luxon is not having a great time of it in the media at the moment – he goes off the ZB talking points and throws his rump base some raw meat ideas like no public transport subsidies and dumping Labour Day and then has to walk them back 24 hours later.
Luxon is rapidly becoming the luckless David Shearer & the stank of political rot is upon him, that’s not a the kiss of death for his attempts at becoming Prime Minister, but where it puts the political power is clearly with ACT and David Seymour.
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Too much despot CEO, too little common man.
The Luxon we see I suspect is the real deal, a miserable money grubbing prick who thinks those worth the time of day are those with the most properties!
One thing I will never understand is why the National party bother going up against the hand that feeds them? All they have to do is let Jacinda win and they are guaranteed no CGT and more house price rises.
Nobody cars outside of a handful of political tragics.
People will vote National and ACT next year for one big reason – they’re not Labour or Green.
That is your wish, however I know plenty that will vote vice versa to yours.
It is the unfortunate task of the thinking punter in NZ to view the antics of politicians that have no interest in serving the people as a whole and are anyway incapable of understanding the needs of the world and humans and living things in it.
They lack the overview of basic living needs for managing a satisfactory life and of how to organise the systems of government, finance and future planning and nurturing our human culture using sociological considerations to bolster all in the nation and move somewhat in line with trends and desires. It is like watching a trapeze artist or a rope walker. One has to watch dispassionately knowing the outcome will not be pleasing whatever it is; if the person succeeds to office one knows they will not be good, if the person falls then that may not be too bad, but who will be brought forward to replace them is the next concern?
So there seems little hope of getting a suitable person in the job as we seem unable out of millions to find a few key people suitable to form a short list. We end up fishing at the bottom of a murky aquarium. Probably we’d go for a goldfish, handsome on the outside but looks aren’t everything.
Perhaps a trial period of the candidates before the final decision. I would vote Tane into the intern group!
What I find remarkable about Chris Luxon is his emphasis on the matter of a Bottom Feeder. Why he had to harp on about his former profession besides ‘having run an airline’ to his real life is puzzling.
It must be so hard for him to call others Bottom Feeders when he has been one for so long that he fails to realise what his name calling truly is.
Is he doing a Copy and Paste from the abysmal track record of Paula Bennett when she was Minister of Social Welfare? That is whilst she was on the DPB and enjoying all the advantages of NZ taxpayers funded education etc she later denied low income NZers achieving anything whilst under a National government.
She denigrated the very people she once was. Luxon is showing how much of a Bottom Feeder he is because he will ALWAYS depend upon the NZ taxpayers to fund his lifestyle and perks of the job.
And so all Luxon needs to do is look in the mirror to see a TRUE BOTTOM FEEDER.
Should have stuck with Simon. From the beginning
Lol. Te Reo has 12 months to sort his shit out. He will. Key and co will make sure of it. His stumbles this week have been drowned out by ram raids, racist legislation and the theft of public assets.
Jack Tame’s interview meant nothing to the majority of the voting public outside of some beltway wet dreams.
Frank there can’t have been negative coverage of three waters, ram raids, and racist legislation to trump Luxon saying something other than “ I used to run Air NZ”.
You are forgetting the special interest journalism fund has been carefully put in place to manipulate the media so only good news comes out and makes the govt look good.
Am I the only one who wouldn’t be surprised if Luxon’s favoured charity was his own happy-clappy evangelical church; and that an $18,000 “donation” went a long way to covering his annual tithe?
There’s no gravitas, no in- depth understanding of the complexities that come with leading a multi-cultural democratic society, no…nothing.
An empty vessel. Key was the same, but sly and cunning with an extremely obliging media. Think… Hosking, Garner, Espiner ,Gower, Leighton Smith, John Armstrong…etc etc….the list went on and on.
I know some top end of town business leaders who are normally always pushing their party that are now…. silent!
Muldoon was good at tax cuts and even better at the politics of tax cuts.
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