Luxon candidate from central casting, so why am I worried?

Acommon fallacy is the belief that a skill in one area is transferable to others. I am a competent writer, at least in my own eyes. This does not mean you should trust me to fix your car or proffer an opinion on a skin lesion. Those who have tasted success in commerce frequently suffer from this delusion. They venture into philanthropy, philosophy and, worse, politics.

The first historical example of this is Marcus Licinius Crassus. He made his money in the late Roman Republic by, legend has it, trafficking in slaves and setting up Rome’s first fire service. Convinced his brilliance knew no limits, he decided to try his hand at a military career and led his men to catastrophic defeat and death in the Syrian desert.

The United States has a wonderful collection of business tycoons who failed at the sordid game of politics; but their primary system is an effective means of ensuring that the likes of Ross Perot and Carly Fiorina never get their inky hands into office.

The beleaguered National Party would do well to dwell on these lessons as it reviews the parade of contenders to captain the party back to power; for the standout candidate is former CEO Christopher Luxon. What do we know of this chap? Luxon’s career highlight was his tenure as the head of Air New Zealand. This came after what appears to have been a successful stint as a senior executive of Unilever’s Canadian business.

These are serious roles. You do not get to be, nor survive, in these positions without a wide range of both commercial and interpersonal skills. In this respect, Luxon’s experience compares favourably with that of Sir John Key’s own remarkable business career before he became the MP for Helensville.

Luxon has a right to be taken seriously, and not dismissed by the likes of me, who has never run anything more than a trifling operation with fewer staff than those employed at Air New Zealand’s lost-ticket office.

Yet, Luxon’s success, and his transition to politics, has something of Gilbert and Sullivan about it. He is the very model of a modern major general. He has ticked every box he could find.

In his maiden speech he rattled them off. Air New Zealand fixed gender pay equality. ‘‘We earned gender and rainbow-tick certifications,’’ he boasted, blithely unaware, or perhaps acutely aware, that these are corporate woke-washing with little more than symbolism about them.

He proudly declared that the airline’s car fleet became fully electric. Like, OK, but he ran an airline whose very business model is built on pumping out an extravagant amount of carbon in order to allow the middle-classes to flit about the sky.

It was the triumph of the symbolic over the real. The speech is a window into Luxon’s world view: ‘‘Making a difference to people’s daily lives is a shared responsibility between Government, community, and also business.’’

If we take him at his word, he is a biggovernment interventionist. ‘‘With the right resources at the right time in the right place, the state can help people make positive and sustained changes that enable them to rise up and to realise their own potential.’’

This would be an unconventional position for Chloe Swarbrick to take, but she is not running to lead the party of small government and personal responsibility. There was almost nothing in his inaugural speech to Parliament that spoke of the need to address the hard issues facing Aotearoa.

Our education system fails to prepare our children for the realities of life. For those on the right of politics, it appears that the sector has been captured by a progressive ideology that places culture and values over reading and writing. Our health system desperately needs some market discipline if it is to properly serve the needs of its customers.

We can all agree, as Luxon did in his maiden speech, about the need to focus on infrastructure. Those are the safe, and easy, issues on which to campaign and govern. What we need, and what most National MPs will privately acknowledge, is a prime minister with an agenda, not one merely hankering after a knighthood.

Thatcher, Douglas, Reagan, Keating were leaders willing to risk it all in order to leave their respective nations better than how they found them. Luxon is more Major than Thatcher. He gives the impression that being liked by progressives on Twitter will be more important to his administration than forcing through the institutional reforms his party pretends to believe in.

If we look objectively at our performance over the past three decades, we can see a gradual decline in our economic quality of life as successive regimes have prioritised the politically safe over the economically necessary.

There is no worse offender than Key, whose eight years of leadership was a competent custodianship of the expanded welfare state he inherited from Helen Clark. We cannot afford the next National government to squander opportunity the way Key did.

The problem with Luxon is that which faces all CEOs migrating to politics. They are used to being in complete control, able to fire, reprimand and cajole those around them.

Politics is a skill learned over time. Ardern is often mocked for her business inexperience, but she spent decades honing her craft. The idea that a neophyte like Luxon is going to hold his own against the best political operator in a generation is incredibly optimistic, and Labour’s sophisticated media operation is likely excited about the opportunities Luxon’s conservative personal beliefs presents.

If National believes in standing for something, rather than lusting after ministerial leather for its own sake, they need to select as leader someone with a proven willingness to take a risk – someone willing to spend political capital, not hoard it.

Yet, the risk New Zealand, and National, faces isn’t that Luxon could lose, but that he could win.