Who will lead the spill against Chris Luxon?

The knives are out for Chris Luxon.

The numbers are being being quietly done.

The only thing that will save him is a successful Investment Summit and according to Hooton, it looks like a clusterfuck of titanic proportions…

Christopher Luxon has just one job next week – Matthew Hooton

New Zealand has a history of ultimately embarrassing prime ministerial summits – David Lange’s 1984 Economic Summit, bearing no relation to his Government’s policy programme; Clark’s 2001 Knowledge Wave conference, preceding a seemingly permanent decline in New Zealand’s productivity growth; and Sir John Key’s 2009 Jobs Summit, at least delivering a cycleway.

Luxon’s idea was to bring to New Zealand the chief executives of investment companies with which the Superannuation Fund had arranged courtesy calls on his overseas travels. The chief executives, he thought, would then be inspired by his oratory and people skills to invest in New Zealand.

This betrayed Luxon’s background as a salesman without any real experience or knowledge of how funds allocate capital, or even who makes the decisions. In most funds, including our Superannuation Fund, the chief executive is just one cog in the wheel of investment decisions, which are made by mandated investment committees overseen by the chief investment officer.

Moreover, investors don’t put money into countries but into projects. A specialist at investing in, say, ports, doesn’t decide to invest in New Zealand and then look around for which port. They’re interested in receiving credible proposals for port projects, from anywhere, and prefer to maintain a balanced global portfolio to manage geopolitical and other risk.

Such projects must also exceed a minimum value specified in their investment mandate.

When Luxon was finally convinced of this last year, and came to understand his original idea of a rah-rah generic marketing exercise would fail, he ordered immediately investable propositions be prepared.

These remain a closely guarded secret, including from those expected to fly across the world for next week’s extravaganza. But NZME’s BusinessDesk reports the Government has so-far identified only four potential public-private partnerships (PPPs) for the short- or medium-term: redeveloping accommodation at the Linton Military Camp, redeveloping Christchurch Men’s Prison, new court rooms in Waitākere and Rotorua, and a four-lane expressway from Warkworth to Te Hana.

We’d all better hope BusinessDesk somehow has this terribly wrong because if that’s all New Zealand has to offer major allocators of global capital after 16-hour flights from New York or Dubai, our country will forever be blacklisted as a destination for their funds. Not even the 24km expressway would meet most funds’ minimum investment thresholds for construction projects and it isn’t clear these are genuine PPPs anyway, but rather slightly more elaborate construction contracts.

...I have previously blogged about my confusion as to why National seemed so optimistic that this Investment Summit would be an economic turning point because by all accounts it looked painfully light on opportunity.

I think they are confusing their excitement at hosting corporate events vs actual economic growth.

China was set to be a large part of this summit, but with a Chinese fleet currently doing live fire tests in the Tasman Sea, their inclusion is going to quickly become a festering sore.

3rd tier Australian Mining companies keen to exploit our Fast Track process doesn’t seem like much of a win and more property speculators isn’t a solution either.

Libertarian Billionaires looking for a bolthole when the climate change collapse kicks in doesn’t seem like a future anyone wants other than them.

National have put all the eggs in this one investment summit and are attempting to sell us prostituting ourselves to the global rich as a great way forward.

It isn’t.

National have confused their excitement for event management as an economic policy, when this falls over, as it will, what new rabbit do they intend to pull out of their hat?

All National have are Austerity Budgets that borrow billions for tax cuts while hollowing out public service budgets. They strangle the common good for their donors interests.

Begging rich people to exploit us at a summit seems masochistic even for the Political Right.

Long story short – the Investment Summit looks like an enormous failure which means the move against Luxon will happen before June to Gove the new candidate a year and a half before the election.

The rumours are:

Judith Collins wants Mark Mitchell, but Mark is too full of self doubt.

The big money donors don’t care as long as Nicola Willis remains Finance.

Simeon Brown hilariously thinks he can do it.

The compromise candidate will be Louise Upston.

Change of National Party Leadership alongside ACTs refusal to back any of Winston’s Ferry proposals could be the excuse Winston needs to trigger a snap election before May 31st.

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