Christopher Luxon's 'State of the Nation' showcases his lack of leadership
While Northland floods and the US punishes NATO allies, Luxon plays the blame game in a lush Auckland conference room.
State of the Nation
After disappearing for half the month while major world events unfolded, our health data was breached, and parts of the country were flooded in the middle of summer, Christopher Luxon is back on the job!
And he decided to come back with the kind of tone-deaf pageantry that he is accustomed to, by dropping his state-of-the-nation speech at the Auckland Business Chamber. Now I’m not going to dissect that or dive too deep into it; other Substacks do that better, but it was filled with what you’d expect from Luxon: passing the blame for his failures onto anything but himself or his party, promising that economic change is once again “just on the horizon,” and pretty much not addressing world events.
The fact that this was all trotted out in a business centre in Auckland, while Northland and other parts of the country are recovering from/battling flood damage, feels like a summary of Luxon as a leader. A better leader would have put his big speech off for a week and maybe gotten some boots on the ground to find out what he could do to help. A better leader would probably also not return after disappearing for weeks and then pitch to the public what he plans to do in the future, instead of showing us in the present.
Maybe he doesn’t want the floods to be addressed because then he’d have to address climate change, and the last two years of this government rolling back climate targets, fast-tracking polluters, and being in the pocket of mining and oil speak for his stance on that.
Luxon keeps pushing for “economic recovery” and “economic independence”, but doesn’t seem to consider that fixing climate change is part of building a strong economy. We can’t keep moving houses to higher land, spending thousands on storm damage and repairs while actively doing nothing to prevent climate change (or actively contributing to making it worse).
As the climate worsens, the damage caused and the price tag to repair it will only rise. The state of our nation is pretty dire, and our Prime Minister giving a speech about economic recovery in a lush business centre after getting back from a “do-not-disturb” holiday is an apt summary of how we got here.
Danz.
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