Luxon Comes out Swinging, but Ignores the Elephants in the Room

On Sunday, Christopher Luxon kicked off his 2023 election campaign with what could rightly be described as his best political speech so far.

Any progressive pundit calling it vacuous or tedious is simply not being objective - and I say that as someone who has not been particularly impressed by Luxon up to now.

Make no mistake about it, in this speech Luxon showed that he has teeth, and an ability to engage in compelling political oration on the stump.

When it came to the topic of law and order, he flared up like a politician from yesteryear, boldly annunciating his party’s moral declarations like an old-timey revival preacher.

It will be interesting to see how he goes in head-to-head combat (an area of weakness for him) with Chris Hipkins over the coming months. If he is willing to acquit himself with the same pugnaciousness he demonstrated on Sunday, the months ahead will be quite the season of political pugilism.

One thing I was especially pleased to hear from Luxon in this speech is that National intends to adjust our tax brackets according to inflation. This is a very important policy for Kiwi wage earners, especially for families, and calling it long overdue would be a massive understatement.

I would even go as far as to suggest that the failure to address this issue by successive previous Governments is a serious failure of leadership that borders on the unjust. So, as you can imagine, I look forward to hearing more about this particular policy in the months ahead.

Despite the positives, including the bursts of genuine passion that Luxon brought to the podium on Sunday, there were still a few elephants in the room that remained unaddressed.

As a realist, clearly cognisant of the widespread rejection and/or ignorance of our greatest heritage - our Christian tradition and it’s important vision of the sacred transcendent order - I have long since stopped expecting modern Western politicians to delve too deeply into the most important aspects of the human experience.

The radical autonomy and subjectivism of Enlightenment liberalism is now standard boilerplate for our modern political class, and in the age of soundbite journalism and cancel culture it’s also a convenient get-out-of-jail-free card to avoid sullying one’s electability by straying too far into matters metaphysical or moral.

All of this means that I don’t expect modern politicians to offer much in the way of a deeper vision of the human person, but it would have been nice if Luxon had articulated something about his personal vision for societal and human flourishing beyond just the economic.

One of my biggest frustrations with him thus far is that he comes across as a hollow man - an empty suit who stands for everything and nothing because he allows spin doctors and polling data, rather than philosophically grounded principles and personal convictions, to guide his political career.

Once again, this is where Luxon was weak in Sunday’s speech, often playing it safe by serving up the milquetoast manure of the management classes rather than any deeper and more meaningful vision of the human experience, leadership and societal greatness.

It seems to me that strong family culture is an essential component of several of the key policy planks that Luxon referenced on Sunday, but sadly there was no articulation of this.

It’s hard to see how we can hope to make meaningful headway on issues of law and order without a clarity of vision about the profoundly important role that strong families, with lovingly dedicated mothers and fathers, need to play in such a societal turnaround.

Then there is the essential role that families need to play in the lives of young people well before they end up becoming trapped in a cycle of welfare dependancy without confidence or aspiration for the dignity of meaningful work.

Which brings me to his major policy announcement, the new FamilyBoost childcare tax break designed to make childcare more affordable for working parents.

My first thought upon hearing the policy was ‘okay, but why isn’t there a vision for unshackling families from state dependancy and undue economic burdens’?

Surely this policy only becomes necessary because prior economic problems have not been adequately addressed by successive governments, and all it does is treat the symptom while ignoring the illness?

The most obvious, and also largely ignored in Luxon’s latest speech, is that of housing affordability.

It seems to me that if we are to get serious about this problem, and the major threat it poses to social stability over the coming decades, we need to start asking some hard questions.

Is it really better for the wellbeing of our country to maintain the status quo of having a large, and growing amount of our housing stock now tied up by landlords as rental properties?

In 1991, rentals made up 24% of our available housing stock, by 2021 that number had risen to 31%.

The hard truth that we need to come to terms with (and, no, I don’t think there are easy fixes to this) is that it would be far more beneficial if those dwellings were owned by Kiwi families as family homes.

Home ownership increases a family’s stake in the local community, benefits their economic future, and allows them to build a meaningful family and communal life with a much greater degree of certainty and stability.

Surely the very fact that so many families now need to rely on childcare services is primarily being driven by the ridiculously expensive nature of home ownership, and the need for both parents to be working full-time just to achieve this?

I don’t have anything against landlords - in fact, I think they often get an unfair shellacking whenever these issues are discussed - but it’s also true that our country would be far better off with less landlords and more families living in their own affordable homes.

While we’re thinking about the availability of housing stock, this seems like yet another area where a coherent vision and set of policies to promote a strong culture of marital stability also really matters. The moment a family is broken apart by divorce, is also normally the moment they will now need to occupy two dwellings instead of just one.

Why not create policies that incentivise banks, or lead to major tax savings related to home loan rates for families with young children? Surely it would be better for families, and thus for the very fabric of our society if parents were paying less on their mortgage so they didn’t need to spend so much time not being present in the lives of their children?

If this is all just about autonomy and economics, then I guess Luxon’s policy is the best we can hope for. However, I can’t see how we can be serious about social stability going forward without communities where people are able to be present with and for each other. For this, we first need a robust culture of loving family life, where intimate parental presence and nurture is the daily norm for our children.

If we don’t address these issues, and citizens increasingly come to feel like wage slaves in someone else’s economic schemes - schemes where they need to sacrifice family life and be forced to tread water just to barely stay afloat, then widespread resentment of the status quo will worsen and spread.

This might not seem like a big deal, but history tells us that this sort of unhappiness is exactly the kind which can become fertile breeding ground for revolutionary extremism of various flavours.

I’ve probably already strayed into territory above my pay grade (and, yes, for those who are wondering, I do understand that other factors play into this crisis as well!), so let me wrap this up with one final salient piece of advice.

Over the coming months of the election cycle, it’s going to be really important to actually listen to the various campaign speeches in full, rather than relying solely on media accounts and interpretations of them.

On Sunday I purposely took the time to listen to Christopher Luxon’s actual speech in full, instead of just the secondhand media reporting or the various social media hot takes doing the rounds.

I’m glad I did, because the full speech contained a lot of important details about National’s ambitions and policy plans for the country that were not adequately represented in mainstream or social media coverage.

Importantly, it also gave me a sense of Luxon as a leader and what it would be like to live under him as a Prime Minister in a way that media interviews don’t (for those who are wondering, I’m still undecided on this point!)

These are things that any serious voter should care enough about to invest their time into becoming fully aware of before casting their ballot in October.