Labour pips Luxon in bad week stakes

Apart from noticing he has an annoying habit of talking over the top of TV interviewers (a habit that extends to everyday conversations as well according to some who have met him), I haven’t paid a lot of attention to National leader Christopher Luxon’s awful week.

I did click on the link to a video of him singing, badly, apparently in response to an interviewer’s question about Labour’s cost of living debacle. It was cringeworthy, in that David Brent from The Office sort of way.

But I missed Grant Robertson’s apparently devastating take down of Luxon in the general debate in the House (who watches the general debate apart from the press gallery and Twitter?).

And while I absorbed the controversy around Luxon’s comments on whether health funding would be inflation adjusted, I had to google the actual interview days later so I could be certain of what he said.

Just a few years ago, when working in the press gallery, I would have watched and weighed up each and every turn in Luxon’s statements on policy as significant. But of course I did. That was my job. And the politicians and their spin doctors all knew something I didn’t really appreciate back then, but do now – most of it is just background noise, because life is already noisy enough. Some politics merits my attention. A lot doesn’t.

So what did register with me on the political front last week? Labour’s cost of living payment has clearly been a debacle, going the same way as KiwiBuild and other policy disasters.

Even those who received it with gratitude would find it hard to forgive the money spray that seems to have captured anyone from French backpackers, to highly paid expats to, yes, even dead people.

It might have been a little galling, meanwhile, for people to open the Labour Party fundraiser that arrived in their letter box immediately after, asking them to show their gratitude by giving some back to the Labour cause.

What else registered? Jacinda Ardern’s extraordinary defence of her Government’s abandoned promises as somehow to be admired; she wouldn’t apologise for being aspirational, Ardern told Q+A’s Jack Tame.

Pardon my confusion, but aren’t ‘‘aspiration’’ and election manifestos two different things? One shoots for the stars, the other nails down the detail, with costings and timetables. Or are policy manifestos nothing more than Instagram memes these days?

But I’m still a former political reporter at heart; my guess is most punters weren’t anywhere near as exercised by the brazenness of such a statement.

Overwhelmingly, however, what registers with me is that Labour has got a problem. The perception that the country is a shambles is starting to become baked in. It’s hastening the mood for change, along with the pain of the soaring cost of living and interest rates, the parlous state of the health system, and perceptions of rising lawlessness.

So yes, Luxon had a bad week. And he will have more bad weeks until he schools himself in how tough, and unrelenting, the job of Opposition leader actually is. If he doesn’t, the hard life lessons learned by David Shearer, David Cunliffe, Phil Goff, Simon Bridges and Judith Collins await.

The excuse so far is that he’s a rookie and is still finding his feet politically. All true.

The man he models himself on, John Key, made it look easy. But Key spent years preparing for the job; grabbing every opportunity to debate his rivals in the House, and unabashedly studying Helen Clark’s every move, often dissecting her performance later with press gallery journalists.

And when he got the job, he had a clear plan to rebrand a tired party. He framed his leadership around a break from the past.

Luxon has shown none of that big energy.

Inexperience doesn’t wash as an excuse. And no-one owes Luxon a soft ride for being a rookie anyway. He wore his ambition for the leadership on his sleeve a long time before he got the job. He needed a better plan than winging it once he got there.

There’s still plenty of time for him to recover from that, however. There’s no reason for National to panic just yet.

Because Luxon’s bad weeks so far aren’t even close to a bad week in Government.

The perception that the country is a shambles is starting to become baked in. It’s hastening the mood for change.

What do you think? Email sundayletters@stuff.co.nz