Analysis: There’s a line I can’t help thinking about, from Christopher Luxon’s speech to a campaign meeting in Mt Roskill last week. It’s where he made a play for the John Key ‘I grew up in a state house and look at me now’ vote.
I quoted this line last week, because it resonated. But then, it kept niggling.
He delivered his line to a big and culturally diverse audience of 300-plus curious locals. “Education is quite personal for me, because I’m a kid whose parents left school at 15 and 16,” he told them. “I’m the oldest of three boys. They had us young. I have amazing parents, and they were determined that I would get a great education.
“And I went through the New Zealand education system, and I managed to get us from a set of circumstances to a better set of circumstances because of education. I know my story is not uncommon. It’s probably common to many of you here in this room as well.”
His new Auckland comms adviser, former TV and radio broadcaster Rachel Smalley, was watching from the back of the room, arms crossed.
The Auckland vote, it goes without saying, is key to who forms a Government after this year’s election. Seats such as Roskill, which National tore from the grasp of former minister Michael Wood in 2023, now hang in the balance.
We can expect to see party leaders spending more and more time in the country’s biggest city, campaigning. Winning electorates such as Roskill and Maungakiekie and Northcote and Takanini is important, but even more so is winning the party votes in those communities and right across Auckland.
National MPs are worried. According to the NZ Herald last night, there are new murmurings about Luxon’s leadership. “There’s going to be change,” said one. “It’s just a question of who is going to be it.”
National MPs will hold a caucus meeting online tonight, RNZ reports, as Parliament is in recess this week.
Labour once dominated the vote in migrant communities, especially Pasifika and Asian groups, but those days are long gone.
National and Act have effectively tapped into the concerns of Asian migrants who may start their own businesses, focused on building assets and skillsets they can hand onto their children. Key issues are crime, taxes, and education.
A narrative of leaders who pull themselves up by their own bootstraps is relatable. And listening superficially, I think many in the room heard a hard luck story they wanted to empathise with. I know I did.
But I’m going to be a tad ruthless and dissect this story, because it goes to the heart of how politicians craft their images to reach new audiences.
1) It wasn’t Luxon who left school early. His parents left school at 15 and 16.
But it was only in the post-war era that the leaving age was raised to 15. Stats NZ doesn’t have data on school-leaving age back then, but points me to the NZ Official Year Book for 1962 that says there was a new trend “now gradually taking effect” of pupils leaving school later.
So, if anything, the fact that one of his parents stayed until they were 16, perhaps nearly 17, was the more remarkable thing. And what he doesn’t mention is that his maternal grandfather was a school principal, so he had at least a tertiary diploma.
2) Luxon was the oldest of three boys, he says. But is this some challenge to be overcome? If anything, an eldest boy has typically been the one advantaged in nuclear family structures the world over. He didn’t have to leave school to support his younger brothers.
3) His parents had their children young, he says. But Luxon, the oldest, was born when his parents were 22 – at a time when Stats NZ indicates the average maternal age for first childbirth was 21 or 22.
The National leader grew up in the relatively affluent Auckland suburb of Howick, and did most of his schooling at good state schools, bar his third form year at the private St Kentigern College. Was the family rich? Probably not. Were they poor? No, they weren’t.
Should this matter? Not really – bar the fact that Luxon is now trying to build a brand around this narrative of overcoming adversity. Sometimes the story is not in what you actually say, but in how you deliver it.
Natalia Mamea was one local resident who put up her hand to ask questions of the National leader at the Mt Roskill meeting. She asked him how his Government had measurably improved the lives of most ordinary New Zealanders, and in particular the more vulnerable.
Luxon pointed to the lowest average rent increase in 25 years, lower interest rates, and lower food inflation than 2022, and hiring more doctors and nurses. But eventually he came back to education – and his backstory.
“One of the questions that we’ve talked about today is, why am I in politics?
Residents of countries such as Ireland and Singapore are now two or three times wealthier than New Zealanders, he said. “And when you’re three times wealthier, you get twice as many nurses, twice as many doctors, twice as many teachers.”
I approached Mamea afterwards. “It’s not often that we have the Prime Minister here in our hood, so I wanted to come down here and have a real, genuine listen,” she told me. “Because what I do know is that people are suffering, people can’t afford basics – even though our current Government are saying that they are fixing the basics.”
Mamea said she was politically non-aligned – a self-employed payroll consultant whose children go to the local Mt Roskill Grammar School.
She offered some faint praise for Luxon’s responses. “I thought he wasn’t having to read off a script,” she observed. “I thought he had a very well-polished, prepared set of talking points for the community tonight, and he was able to respond with National’s standard responses to what were some pretty significant questions from the crowd – some real decent questions around education in particular.”
Today, Labour’s Chris Hipkins is speaking to small businesses in Rotorua, while later in the week, Luxon will take on the South Island – where the green shoots of an economic recovery are taking hold. But some of the messages his southern audiences will want to hear will be similar to those in Mt Roskill – taxes, regulation, law and order, and education.
It remains to be seen whether voters will sympathise with Luxon’s narrative of the self-made man overcoming adversity, when their own families and businesses remain so challenged.
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