Nats’ ‘election result decisive on diversity’

National Party leader Christopher Luxon says he will have trouble putting together an ethnically diverse front bench because of the party’s poor election result.

Luxon is planning on unveiling a reshuffle of the 33-member National caucus on Monday, with MPs getting new portfolios and new rankings.

Asked on Thursday if he was looking to achieve some ethnic diversity with his front bench of 12 MPs, Luxon noted the caucus itself lacked ethnic diversity.

‘‘Well look, I mean, the reality is, when you look at our caucus today it’s not ethnically diverse, right, and that’s because we got a much poorer result in the last election than we had planned.’’ National won 23 fewer seats in Parliament in 2020 than 2017 and was left with a far less ethnically diverse set of MPs. Indeed, the party is now overwhelmingly Pā kehā , with just three MPs of Mā ori descent and one MP of Asian descent.

Luxon noted that the candidate list at the last election had been more diverse.

‘‘If you looked at our candidate list, you would have seen a very diverse set of candidates available.’’

The National MPs who survived the election were largely in safe seats, whose members have typically picked white candidates.

Simon Bridges was the only successful non-white electorate MP, out of 23 National electorate MPs.

Luxon said the reshuffle would focus on matching people to their best jobs.

‘‘We’re going to use all the talents ... in our caucus and we’re going to balance it and make it work, but importantly, we’re also going to . . . get the right individuals and the right tasks all synced up, joined up, so we’ve got single points of focus.’’

Luxon’s predecessor Judith Collins commissioned a report on the election loss.

The report suggested National ‘‘develop a diversity plan’’ and update the process it used for candidate selection, in order to ‘‘bring in diverse and high-quality talent, regardless of the election result’’.

Collins dismissed the idea of quotas for diversity.