Christopher Luxon scolding a business audience for being like children is unlikely to land well, especially given his previous employer.
The prime minister has frequently been accused of being an indifferent communicator – someone with a rare talent for delivering an indecipherable response to the most basic question.
Just this week Christopher Luxon’s office was forced to confirm that he had intended to rule out working with Opportunity, because despite being given three goes at it, he still seemed to be hedging. He came across both confident and confused in response to questions about visas for those impacted by the Iran war, having already created perhaps the apex example, when he seemed to entertain the concept of carpet bombing.
Yesterday he managed to avoid any similar ambiguities in addressing an audience assembled by Rotorua’s Business Chamber. Luxon struck a tone more associated with a coach dressing down a school first XV team after an abysmal first half. He leaned heavily on his experience as a regional manager for deodorant within the vast Unilever empire when he implored the audience to harden up.
“I didn’t sit there in Chicago and say, ‘I wonder what the government thinks? I wonder what they’re going to do to help me with my business? I wonder if I can get some grant money to do something?’ I’m a business person,” he told the audience of regional business owners.
“I come home to New Zealand, and there’s a parent-child mentality,” he continued. “I’ve literally sat in boardrooms across New Zealand, and heard people say, ‘I wonder what the government is going to do?’ Who cares what the government is going to do!”
Leaving to one side the unfortunate echoes of those 2023 “wet, whiny and inward-looking” comments, and to another side the National Party’s recent misfires with needy-children metaphors, the audience might have been forgiven for finding it all a bit rich, coming from someone so famously sorted, who was paid over $4m from his final year working for a government-owned business. After his time at Unilever was done, Luxon returned to lead Air New Zealand – probably the country’s most prominent corporate executive role, and one that ultimately propelled him first to parliament, and then to the ninth floor.
This matters in the context of chiding that Rotorua audience, because few companies have benefited from such a deep and lasting relationship with government as Air New Zealand. The airline operates on infrastructure that was largely built or funded by central or local government, with tight attention and regulation.
It was founded as a joint venture between the governments of New Zealand, Australia and the UK, domestically nationalised in 1945 and became wholly government owned from 1961. It was privatised by the Lange government, and had an enormous, near-billion-dollar bailout in 2001 which saw it returned to majority government ownership.
A sell-down by John Key’s National-led government nonetheless saw the government remain a majority shareholder, as it remains to this day. When Covid came along, Air New Zealand received a $900m loan, dwarfing the support offered to any other single business. Luxon had left in 2019, but the timing was pure luck – had he stayed on a year he would have taken the loan as gratefully as his successor Greg Foran did.
While Luxon’s time leading Air New Zealand is one of the more serene in its history, it neatly coincides with a period of rare macroeconomic stability. Ultra-low interest rates prompted a rise in travel globally, while Key’s government encouraged inbound migration, which had a corresponding benefit to businesses like Air New Zealand. The country’s population increased by more than 10% while Luxon led the airline, a very helpful backdrop.
None of this is to denigrate Luxon’s leadership per se. He is rightly regarded as one of Air New Zealand’s best CEOs, and its profitability and share price help bear that out. But the company is one of the most well-supported and highly politically exposed in New Zealand, and always has been.
Contrast that with his audience yesterday. In 2025, the Rotorua business chamber held its annual awards. Winners included tourism businesses, retailers and a trailer hire company. All will have suffered through the profound impact of the previous government’s decision to turn its famed accommodation sector into emergency housing through the pandemic and its aftermath.
It was also a government decision which happened to the city against its will. It’s hard to imagine that any one any of those businesses would have requested it. While steps have been taken by both central and local government to repair those wounds, this is the kind of complex, traumatic and scarring event which takes years if not decades to fully recover from.
To be lectured by Luxon, who owes his current job to his time leading a goliath of government intervention, the remarks must have been particularly galling.
There is zero chance that an anonymous deodorant salesman would have been elected prime minister without his time leading an airline with profound bailouts on either side of his tenure. His time there which gave him the platform to lead this country. To underline the point, Christopher Luxon has worked for, but never led, an organisation which had to be truly self-reliant, without an implicit or explicit government backstop.
Thus it would have been nice to see some humility from him, given the enormous scale of government interventions which made his time at Air New Zealand possible. For all the criticism of his indecipherable speech, perhaps that’s preferable to what happens when he really does make himself clear.
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