“What I Say To You Is By Any Measure of My Own Way of Measuring I Just Failed My Own Performance Review in Public” (almost) says Christopher Luxon

The PM in TV interview shocker

Jack Tame is a very good interviewer. Q and A is a very good show (that’s why it’s buried at 9am on Sunday). Prime Minister Christopher Luxon is a baked potato spilling out of his jacket. And on Sunday, at 9am he was looking fairly well cooked. Tame gave him an extra roasting, just to check.

Prime Minister of New Zealand, and/or Leader of the National Party (two very different jobs when it comes to taking a political stance) and neither of them with enough room for Luxon to also sit across a portfolio, like pretty much every leader has ever done, Old Mate actually prefers to call himself a CEO basically. Chilled Entertainer, Obviously. He’s the CEO, the country is the business (“it’s the business mate!”) and we lucky few (the residents of the business) are the customers.

Luxon studiously avoids scrutiny, shakes his head and/or his hands and tells people that he’s gonna do things differently. He steps up after cabinet meetings and strenuously avoids questions. He prefers to be interviewed by people that work for Newstalk ZB because it gets the best reception (in all senses of the word) at the golf clubs of New Zealand.

But after a year of dodging and ducking, his first full year as the PM/Business Leader he agreed to the PR disaster that was the Jack Tame interview on Q and A.

He said his What I Say To You/What I Will Say/What I Can Say meaningless line a staggering 20 times at least. Pretty much every minute of the interview was punctuated by this daft meme of a line.

I cannot get past the fact that if Luxon really was/is a CEO type and New Zealand really is the business he’s running, he’d watch back the tape of this interview and fire himself. By every measure, by any way you might slice the rubric — he fucking failed. Not just struggled. Not just looked like Christopher Flummoxed. He crashed the car into the side of the garage as he was backing out. And then just decided to keep driving into that same wall in the world’s most inefficient, self-flagellating U-turn.

He continued to blame the last lot for everything. He admitted to knowing that the Treaty Bill was divisive on a level that would bring huge protest, and then voted for it at first reading anyway.

He didn’t know facts. He didn’t care about figures. These are tools of his trade. And he turned up with a FisherPrice plastic hammer and still attempted to construct a series of replies. The real hammering came, of course, from Tame.

The huge worry is that Luxon watched this back on Sunday, cradled in Amanda’s gym-arms, and cooed toward the telly that he mighta actually, well, what he could say was… “nailed it?”

In any other job if someone is blaming the last person that did the job a year later, they’re on a performance plan and halfway out the door, if not all the way. Their colleagues think of them as some sad joke. Incredulous feelings in the building. A little side-quest under way to determine whether the degree and CV were required by sending in eight times as many Weet-Bix lids as you needed for the set of All Blacks cards.

You should not be able to watch a probing, 20-minute interview with the leader of your country/business and feel like it would make a good drinking game.

This interview is so excruciating that I’ll share it again here in case you missed it and just decided to glide past at the top. I am planning on watching it once a week as my new How Not To — not that I’m in politics. Or ever planning to be. I just would not want to be like this: In Life.

I’m also not in political writing at all. As someone will undoubtedly comment below or message me privately to say — “stick to your terrible music taste buddy”. All good. Three of my favourite local writers and fellow Substackers already cooked Luxon’s goose far better than I could ever try. Check out these zings:

Luxon Finally Shows

The Prime Minister hits the cones

The Christopher Luxon Excuse Generator