LUXON’S VIEWS, PLANS FOR PARTY

National Party leader Christopher Luxon used his first few hours in the job to hew back to the traditional National Party values and confirm his intention to lead a ‘‘moderate’’ and outward-looking institution.

It would be, he said, a party that keeps the urban liberal and rural conservative factions in the caucus in the same tent.

The new leader began a media round in earnest yesterday evening, crafting a new narrative about a National Party that has moved on from the division of the past two years, by eschewing the factional battles since Bill English resigned in 2018.

‘‘It’s about things like personal responsibility. It’s about caring for others. It is fundamentally about, you know, that if you’re going to work hard, you deserve to do well, the back of that freedom, choice, all those traditional values,’’ Luxon said during an interview at Parliament last night. ‘‘We are a country built on bicultural traditions, but we are also a modern multicultural country that needs to look forward, go forward and get out in the world.’’

Luxon said that he has spent the first few weeks of the last lockdown reading a history of the National Party to work out what made the institution, which he now leads, tick.

‘‘An urban liberal piece, a rural conservative piece, and that has been in the traditions in our party of moderate liberal, moderate conservative, moderate being the operative word. And we’ve been at our best when that’s been critical, and when we’ve been at our base.

‘‘What’s also been important is that we actually represent all the communities of New Zealand.

‘‘It was called the National Party, because it was supposed to, it does act in the national interest, and that’s why it’s there.’’

Luxon has his work cut out. More than 400,000 voters left National at the last election and the party has been polling in the doldrums. He would not put a target on what he wanted to lift National’s polling up to. ‘‘We’re going to take it day by day and actually just focus on if we do it right. Everything else will take care of itself. And so bottom line is we know we’ve got work to do but what you saw today was a National Party turn the page.’’

The former Air NZ CEO said that he plans to bring his business experience to wrangle the disparate National caucus into working together.

He would not, however be drawn on whether he was going to push for more diversity in the National Party caucus lineup.

‘‘I mean, first and foremost I’m a performance talent person, you

know, that’s really important, the ‘what’ people do, and then the ‘how’ they go about doing it. Those are the two metrics by which I manage people.’’

Luxon’s predecessor Judith Collins put a considerable amount of effort into her ‘‘demand the debate’’ campaign, a centrepiece of which was opposing a report produced within the public service called He Puapua.

Collins portrayed the report, which is not Government policy, as the thin end of the wedge for changed institutional arrangements and iwi co-governance in

New Zealand. Luxon indicated that he would be moving on from He Puapua, but also took aim at identity politics.

‘‘Look, we’ve turned the page, we’re going forward, we believe fundamentally in a very inclusive New Zealand. And I do think there’s a lot of identity politics across the political spectrum.

‘‘And we are each and every individual actually much bigger than our individual identities. And that’s what we’ve got to focus on is actually how do we collectively as a whole New Zealand, take our country forward.’’