The real reason Luxon dramatically reshuffled Cabinet

By
Martyn Bradbury
-
60
2155

There is a far more dangerous explanation to what we are seeing with Luxon’s dramatic Cabinet reshuffle.

The irony of cutting Dr Shane Reti after all the cutting he has done to public health is as hilarious as believing Simeon Brown is qualified to run the Ministry of Health, a Minister who is currently raising speed limits around schools to lift productivity FFS!

A Minister of Health who was once the President of a Christian ProLife anti-abortion lobby group is like making Sean Plunkett the CEO of Radio NZ.

The reason Luxon is making this dramatic reshuffle is because National are in deep, deep, deep trouble economically.

This reshuffle is a political stunt to keep you distracted from some enormous economic change on the way.

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Bernard Hickey is devastating in his economic critique…

    1. PM Christopher Luxon presented his new Cabinet this week as refreshed and refocused on hustling for economic growth, but again did so without any new strategies or policies beyond doubling down on extracting and selling resources and assets to prop up a housing market with bits tacked on;
    2. However, nearly half all professionals and managers surveyed for recruiter Robert Walters’ 2025 salary guide don’t buy it, and are either throwing in the towel and planning to migrate themselves to Australia in the next year (42% of the 3,000 New Zealanders surveyed), or expect their employees to leave in 2025 (40% of managers surveyed);
    3. The economy also isn’t cooperating with the Government’s bet that lower interest rates will solve everything, with most metrics indicating per-capita GDP is still contracting faster and further than at any time since the National-alone Government of 1990-96 unleashed a series of crash-or-crash-through government spending and welfare cuts;
    4. The interest rate cuts being relied on by the Government to restart the housing market are also not working, as QV’s report today of flat prices and activity in December showed, with QV Operations Manager James Wilson saying: “It looks as though the economy is still in a dark place right now, and debt to income ratios should still keep a lid on things in the year ahead.”;
    5. The abrupt Government fee increases, funding cuts, capital freezes, spending reviews and repeals that have crashed back and forth across departmental budgets and the Cabinet in the last year have both undermined confidence in the civil construction and housebuilding sectors, and angered traditional National’s provincial supporters, let alone shocked council planners and consenters into a nationwide freeze; and,
    6. The most awful example of the desperation and frustration many feel about the funding cuts and limbo-like budgets is in disability funding, where parents of severely disabled children face yet more years without respite, as shown in this deeply reported feature yesterday by former DHB member Colleen Brown at The Listener (gift link)

…if there is only one news source you can afford to subscribe to, Bernard’s really is the one.

He makes the devastating point that the reshuffle means nothing if Luxon is still locked into:

“extracting and selling resources and assets to prop up a housing market with bits tacked on;”

Hooton has made the point for a very long time that National stopped having any philosophical political values linked to policy and instead had replaced all political values and all policy for donor talking points and that when elected, all National really had were a list of legislative deregulations that their donor interests wanted as policy.

This has resulted in weird policies that voters didn’t really expect come flooding out of National that has made the Party deeply unpopular with a bitter post Covid electorate who voted in anger against Labour.

That post Covid bitterness is becoming dulled by watching this Government help their donor mates while trampling the common good.

For all her faults, Jacinda’s kindness demanded more from the State than blunt instruments of privatisation and de-regulation for rich pricks.

Luxon’s weakness at getting played by Seymour and Winston over culture war grievances that turn off the middle voter won’t get better as the Economy really starts haemorrhaging after Trump’s Tariffs push the US dollar up so much so that petrol prices explode.

This is a Cabinet reshuffle put together out of desperation to create a sense of momentum that isn’t actually there.

Luxon could reshuffle the Cabinet another 50 times, but if the Austerity Agenda is still the same, nothing will impact the economic meltdown we will suffer.

National are going to increasingly own this pain and voters are going to be very vengeful.

What was the point of a borrowed $12 tax cut if the Government are hitting you with a plethora of user pays costs that are far in excess of what they gave you?

They’ve given you crumbs while stealing your toast.

You’ve been manipulated by the Right.

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60 COMMENTS

  1. Certainly replacing Dr Reti with Brown is as incomprehensible as why a clown like Luxon was put in as leader of the National Party pack.

    • It’s going to get ugly …very ugly…Ayesha Verrall will expose and slaughter that little twerp Brown for his naivety…but..

      …will some of the media chose to be selective in their reporting to protect Brown.

      If they do, then we are in a very dark place.

      Clearly, with 90,000 people coming into the country a year …every year…the pressure on the system is only going to ramp up…rapidly.

      Brown, with his stupid know nothing reckons, will be swamped in a sea of
      discontent.

      It would be laughable if it wasn’t for the fact that many people will suffer, unnecessarily, or die, as a result.

      We are witnessing the rapid decline of N.Z. right before our eyes.
      It was once a great country…not any more.

      • @ grant.
        “Is going to get ugly” It was always fucking ugly.
        This, boys and girls is our history. One of dodgy old cunts stealing your money.
        BNZ.
        A Foolish Government and Our Money are Soon Parted
        https://jameshogan.nz/2023/07/17/a-foolish-government-and-our-money-are-soon-parted/
        Poor management and irresponsible lending
        Up until the bank was partially privatised in 1987, with 13% floated on the New Zealand stock exchange at $1.75 per share, the bank had been 100% owned by the government.
        Under government control also means responding to the shareholding minister’s of the day, and their political drivers.
        While under government control, it had lent money to highly leveraged companies in both New Zealand and Australia during the share market boom pre-1987, culminating in bad debt provisions in the billions in the early 1990s.”
        Gee, funny that.

    • He took a Party that was losing it’s way and got it back into shape enough to convince the voters it could lead the country out of the mess it was in.
      It has been a hard slog after 6 years of mismanagement but the tide is turning and the economy will improve by mid year and in 18 months will be able to go to the nation brining with success.

      • There was no years of mismanagement…that is utter bullshit..
        What there was,was a 1 in 100 year deadly pandemic thay shut down the world economies and 8×1 in 100year weather events …all in the space of 5 years.

        Luxon can’t even cope now .. ..he certainly wouldn’t have coped with that kind of complexity and pressure..

        Ardern and Bloomfield were singled out by WHO as one of the best responding countries on the planet.

      • Correct Trevor as always.
        I enjoy reading your thoughtful objectivity,hugely different to the nonsense spouted by your adversaries who are driven by their own failure.

      • The business cycle cycles. So far all they’ve done is exacerbate the bottom making an extra 1% unemployed and most kiwis poorer. But Rich&Sorted he’s sweet.

      • Trevor that’s bollocks quite frankly, with exception of “he convinced voters.” Conned my might be a more accurate word given the performance to date. How the f can you say he’s getting the economy in shape?

  2. A shame Simeon Brown was moved from Transport, where he was doing an excellent job and Local Government where Wanganui District Council are right now pulling a Co Governance rort. A strong Minister is needed in both portfolios and in the case of Simon Watts I am not sure he is the man for the Local Government job.

    I think Luxon was the problem with Health once he told Mike Hosking he was HELPING Shane Reti with the Portfolio.

    Helping or meddling is the question I have and Reti has paid the price.

    • Brown was worse than hopeless in both portfolios.
      You clearly haven’t driven our pot holed roads lately and our highways are like judger bars. He is beholden to the trucking companies for their donations as clearly demonstrated years earlier when Steven Joyce allowed trucking tonnage on our roads to increase 10 fold. Add to that, Brown is clueless on road death correlation to speed, so he will always be known as the grim reaper of transport.

      • Wonderful fellow is Simeon he does things whereas the modus operandi
        of the opposition is do nothing but collect the salary.

    • What was the ‘excellent job he was doing?

      Removing EV support?

      Increasing speed limits?

      Increasing the road toll?

      Accelerating global warming?

      Great job alright.

      Health will become a very sad joke under the little twat with most Kiwi’s shut our of our health system – more great work from the pathetic little yes man.

  3. My humble reckons are that Simeon Brown was dropped into Health because their overall plan is to privatise as much of the Health department as possible.

    This need to privatise will be blamed on current mismanagement, incompetence and inability to stay within their meagre starvation budgets.

    Just as they always justify.

  4. “What was the point of a borrowed $12 tax cut”

    Dismally the country is run so that $12 is a significant amount of money for some.

    When the tide turns. Labour as a policy should make the first $35k tax free for people on less than $35k. It would only reduce the income tax take by 5%. Easily recouped at the top end.

  5. ( Cough-cough…) As I’ve written here before and even before that and then long before that…
    We’re fucked. And what’s worse is that it’s not our fault. I’ve done a lot of driving here and there then over there and as I’ve written in the comments section here before, we’re out of stock. Literally. There’s no sheep or beef cattle anywhere but for the odd one or two.
    Farming is what we got and it’s all we’ve got and our farmers have been driven into poverty and exhaustion by the very same dirty, lying fucking national party scum who tell farmers that they, the national party are the farmers besties when, in reality, they’re our farmers worsties. We AO/NZers are an exporting country. We exported agricultural produce like wool, meat, dairy, fruits and fish. But along came auckland with its greedy, lazy denizens and predated our agri-culture until we’re here and now and here and now is fucked.
    How do we un-fuck ourselves we might bravely ask? Well, we can’t. We’re so fucked that australia now heads us off at every wool auction. Our meats are all but non existent and even if we had our usual wonderful world first commodities to export no one would touch us because of the arsing about we put our trading partners through that now, no one will touch us. You don’t believe me? Then fucking looking it up!
    The only thing we can do as a whole is to ban the now australian owned banks from trading here today, then write off all mortgage debt to everyone. We then absolutely must conduct a deep-cleanse royal commission of inquiry up and into the national party and its partners in crime spanning the last 88 years, the 88 years since the formation of the national party.
    Ask about stored, triple dumped wool and of food exports being stymied to up prices to over there after our farmers were forced to sell at rock bottom prices here. Ask about how it was that we were once labeled ‘The market garden of Europe ‘ but now we’re the basket case of the pacific islands. The Cook Islands in particular aye boys?
    Looking Back – BNZ Part 6: The bank adopts Fay, Richwhite proposal
    https://businessdesk.co.nz/article/the-life/looking-back-bnz-part-6-the-bank-adopts-fay-richwhite-proposal
    The national party are not a political party at all. They’re crooks doing crooked shit. Let. That. Sink. In.

  6. pdm “ …he told Mike Hosking he was HELPING Shane Reti with the portfolio.” Early onset dementia ?
    A soap salesman helping a qualified medical professional is mind boggling and Reti has taken one for the team, but if Luxon starts ‘helping’ Brown the banker with health, the health system is stuffed IMO.

    • Many excellent builders go bankrupt because they are not good managers of money or staff.The same could be said about Reti who was a good medical man but seemed to find it hard to counter the public servants who were protecting their patch .

  7. ” Oh Fuck! ” Part two.
    There is another element to what’s happening to our country and our economy and that’s the impending sale of our country. Luxon knows what’s going on. He’s been in there for years so he knows exactly how vulnerable we Kiwis are to what’s about to come at us. But he’s ok with that! He’s sorted!
    Once the Crown becomes an irrelevance and we’re then a helpless republic, @ Maori will be gone before they can ask ” Pass the ammunition.” . Our only planet is on fire and the flames will grow higher so we must act in a radical manner to protect one another. Our farmers and @ Maori must cling to each other and the rest of you must stand beside us. In unity. There’s no other way to do this unless becoming someone else’s global-slave’s bitches is something.

  8. Luxon is a drongo. Unfortunately Labour are not the answer or the alternative. Grant Robertson wrecked the economy. Face it Bomber. Unaccounted for borrowings???WTF!! I am a senior citizen this is the very worst economic depression I have ever experienced. It is the result of Grant Robertson’s incompetence. And we what know Ruth Richardson and Bill Birch did this is worse.

    • @ shona.
      Is luxon a drongo though? He’s filthy rich and is the prime minister of our beautiful AO/NZ so he’s not that stupid and given his personality profile he’s also fucking dangerous in that weak, pink, limp-dick white collar criminal sort of way. Don’t under estimate the little fucker.
      And remember and this is important. There is no Left and there’s no Right. We have instead a cadre, a gang of crooks and since roger inserted neo-liberalism up us in the late 80’s then jimbo the bulge gave us lucky few mmp we’ve had no counter narratives to the greed and cruelties of a far right psychopathic bone pickers club.
      Check this lot out? And follow the leads… Get to know your enemy. ( Cheers Sun Tzu . )
      https://businessdesk.co.nz/article/the-life/looking-back-bnz-part-6-the-bank-adopts-fay-richwhite-proposal

      • Drongo does not necessarily mean stupid. So that is not what I said.
        Further definition of an Aussie colloquial term:
        Has a narrow perspective due to a narrow and limited life experience.
        His money was made in the USA not here under our dreadful system
        He wasn’t in NZ for most of the neo lib reforms
        He is a yes man.
        He dresses in drab unimaginative clothing.( boring)
        He belongs to a weird money orientated Christian Sect.
        Belies a lac k of intellect.
        He is utterly and inexcusably ignorant of the Treaty Of Waitangi Reforms.
        He knows fuck all about NZ History
        His understanding of NZ law is woeful
        Being able to accumulate money is not a laudable skill
        Trump is proof of that.
        So is Key
        Bussiness people are not known for their depth of character or ability to value and strengthen our democracy.
        Luxon is proof of that.
        Hence he is a DRONGO>
        Because no one knows what they’ve got until it’s gone!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

        • Shona Luxon’s an unusual phenomenological specimen, and that’s about it. Your comment about business people is as old as the hills and very relevant when it
          comes to running a country. In New Zealand, business persons and commercial traders were never regarded as entirely respectable, and this still applies in England and other European countries where there’s a big social and probably ethical, gulf between them and professionally qualified and/or skilled persons. Key wanted or needed to be liked but Luxon’s oblivious to such niceties and both of them history ignorami.

          Your Aussie drongo can be an endearing sort of character, but Luxon ? Only to himself. Clothes do maketh the man ( Hi there, Winston) but Chris chooses the most significant event in the Christian calendar to take his off, and flaunt himself in pyjamas, which is weird, almost some sort of regression to childhood, and not really Prime Ministerial conduct.

      • He’s rich through buying properties, not by building houses, or producing anything even vaguely substantial or useful, except to himself.

        He has added nothing of value to this country, only to himself. Not even an entrepreneur like one or two others have been. His lack-lustre boring bumbles are Chris playing out the way he’s meant to be; his arrogance off the planet. God defend New Zealand, because this little poseur is worse than his slimey mentor whose only regret was not changing his adopted country’s flag.

    • You mean the borrowings that funded training of 60k new trades people ,most of whom have now left NZ ,the new schools that were funded but are now scrapped and the roads that were paid for because they were under funded by national by at least 50% and the list goes on .
      Now we are tipping 1 billion of our cash into the cook straight because willis was jealous of the great deal we had to buy two great ferries .Now we are borrowing 12 billion to fund tax cuts for weallthy land lords .All while the economy is crashing into the straight as well .Grow up and look at the carnage that is going on .Willis is lucky that 80k people have left NZ who would now be on the unemployment list which would be over 300k right now .The economy is now seeing the folly of high unemployment with record people leaving along with record business closures and spending and tax take crashing to new lows .
      Low inerest rates are coming which is a sign of a poor economy and inflation will be back to over 6% by mid year as fuel prices and imports go through the roof as our dollar crashes further and the US goes up .

    • Nicola Willis makes Robertson look like Einstein. The economic situation we are in falls at her feet not Robertson and thinking National and Willis are the answer long term is akin to putting Trump in a room of play girls and thinking he won’t grab em by the pussy, won’t happen.

      • Trump’s was locker-room talk. This dumb pair affect the whole country and it’s future. Willis gazing adoringly at Luxon as if he’s Einstein is the same sickening performance Meghan M puts on trying to kid the world that she cares about Harry. It is juvenile, inappropriate, and unprofessional; they’re out of their depth, and don’t care, IMO.

        • Worse still skyrocketing rent costs are driving inflation…thanks National, your rewarding landlords above all else is destroying our country.
          How’s those tax cuts you were bribed with looking now?

  10. Dr Ciggaretti was dumped because he is Maori and likewise Lee because she is Asian .We now have a white colonist white supremist government in power .Winston ,the ego maniac ,has been handed the poison challace of rail and ferries which will be under funded and eventually sold for a dollar to some parasite or shut down completely .Brown is an idiot who found how hard it is to build a road in NZ because of the terrain and the asociated cost per KM .I traveled over the Brenderwyn hill last week and am impressed with the work that was done under urgently by the last government .It is a massive improvement and even the locals we stayed with are now saying it is no rush to build a new 4 lane road there as it mat well not be economic .
    I fear for the health system with Brown in charge along side Levy .
    As for Mitchell being in charge of ethnic afairs what a fucken sick joke that is .
    In general Luxon has shown what a fucken queer cunt he is .

    • Outstanding as usual Gordon and when Bob thick fuck is triggered we all know you are right. They need to cut Bob’s benefit off or at least make sure his ankle bracelet stays on.

  12. All the Australian s will be moving to NZ in the next 10 years anyway,as it will be to HOT to live in a land of sand. Meaning the economy will be fixed.

  13. Young Simeon looks like the teen version of the Count from Sesame St…

    1 bean, 2 beans, 3 beans…MWAHAHAHAHA!!!

  15. Is our human political, that humour, jist deride withouthout care its knowing its care. Bomber, is this the fools, that play with your line.

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