It’s a restless prime minister who takes the reins

Ata“fire side chat” with deputy Nicola Willis on Tuesday, Christopher Luxon talked about what an odd building the Beehive is. It was, he said, not conducive to teamwork and encouraged people to work in silos.

This is often a criticism of Parliament in general. Long corridors with individual offices, MPS and ministers with their own little teams, working on their plans, balancing their policies and priorities, and, in some cases, making mischief.

If there is one thing that is going to be clear in the new Luxon ministry it will be expectations. Luxon has very firm expectations of what he thinks his ministers should achieve and how long it should take them to achieve it.

He operate son a basic default of trusting people until they give him reason not to. But once he doesn’t they will be gone. The new ministry has been told in no uncertain terms that shouting at staff and that sort of thing won’t be tolerated. And ministers won’t be sacked or changed only for scandal reasons, but also for simple under-performance.

Luxon uses the jargony language of business to talk about New Zealand being a “turnaround job”. And he is serous about it. In an interview with The Post last week he talked about “ruthless clarity”. Senior public servants will be under no illusions about what the new Government wants to achieve, or when it wants to achieve it.

Already there have been briefings from officials on matters ranging from repealing the clean car rebate to tightening up the Reserve Bank’s monetary policy target.

While operationally independent from the Government, when Reserve Bank Governor Adrian Orr met with Luxon and Willis earlier in the week he would have been left in no doubt that getting inflation under control is priority number one for the Government. It also plans to play its part by dialling down spending and making sure that fiscal and monetary policy are pointing in the same direction.

National may have been critical of Orr in the past couple of years, but he is a professional and will work constructively under whatever act or policy targets agreement the Government gives him.

It is also understood that in briefings with public servants about its 100-day plan – a mixture of repealing some things things and getting started on others – there has been a sense from National ministers that the public service has become accustomed to moving very slowly.

National plans for the clean car discount to be gone by December 31, and it is understood that officials suggesting ways it might be done more slowly were given pretty short shrift by the Government. Even in these early stages, some ministers think it is clear why the previous government struggled to achieve a lot of things.

The budget cuts that are going to be required in the public sector will also be a key mechanism for sorting who the strong senior public servants are. While almost all senior public servants like to grow their ministries, the good ones will know, deep down, where the fat in their organisations can be found.

The poor ones, meanwhile, will get defensive and offer up savings which are politically unpalatable. Luxon will be keeping an ear to the ground to find out who fits which category.

Stylistically, Luxon also revealed a lot about who he was at his first post-cabinet press conference. Many people assume that most politicians are very comfortable in their own skin. This is fundamentally not the case. They are often insecure and not especially comfortable about who they are. After all, a lot of people who get into politics have something to prove to the world. A lot crave adulation.

Luxon is a bit different. He is a person who is very comfortable with who he is and equally comfortable taking decisions then living with the consequences. He clearly likes to be liked, but it doesn’t drive him.

So at his first post-cabinet presser, when he talked about Winston Peters’ intemperate and false grizzles about the media being bribed, Luxon basically said that he and Peters were different people, but that he more or less agreed that a lot of people thought that the Public Interest Journalism Fund wasn’t a great idea.

Luxon is also understanding of and not concerned by the fact that ACT and NZ First are different parties with different people who have different ways of talking.

In other words, he won’t be trying to “manage” Winston Peters or David Seymour. Nor will he allow himself to be defined by what his coalition partners say and do, provided they are getting done what he promised will happen.

He also appears pretty keen on giving ministers their head and letting them get on with the job. The tightly managed regime under Jacinda Ardern, where the Prime Minister’s Office seemed to be alerted to just about everything by most ministers (Andrew Little being the main exception) appears likely to be loosened by Luxon.

A return to something more resembling Cabinet government, where responsible ministers are expected to be practically and politically responsible as well having their names on ministerial warrants, will be a good thing for New Zealand.

Now that is all great of course, but the question will be the extent to which Luxon can make it all work and not succumb to the centralising pressure of the day-to-day.

If he succeeds he will be one of the first genuine CEO prime ministers in the world. John Key was wealthy and hailed from the corporate world, but as predominantly a forex trader before his political career, he came from a very different background to Luxon. Luxon is used to managing big, complex companies with significant internal bureaucracies.

It remains an open question how transferable those skills are to running government.

The biggest difference is that in the corporate world you can sack an underperforming member of the executive. While Luxon can do the same, it carries risk – a Cabinet minister can be sacked from the ministry but not as an MP. And sulky MPS can create problems if the Government’s fortunes are not going overly well.

More than anything, however, Luxon looks like a guy who is happy to actually have a proper job again.