Shed the CEO. Become the Prime Minister.

Christopher Luxon is the Prime Minister of New Zealand — the highest-profile job in the land. So why does he keep referring to himself the CEO?

That one word speaks explains a lot when it comes to his lack of popularity and the National party’s inability to gain traction in the polls. Because being a Prime Minister and being a CEO are not the same job; they are not interchangeable titles. This confusion is not just a communications problem. It is both a constitutional problem and a failure of imagination.

New Zealand has no formal, written constitution, which means its constitutional arrangements rest on convention, norms, and the understood roles of its institutions.

The Cabinet Manual is the closest thing we have to a guidebook and it spells out the role of the Prime Minister. They are head of the executive government (the decision-making body for the country), the Governor-General's principal adviser and Chair of Cabinet. They have Ministerial responsibility for national security and intelligence matters and they carry a general coordinating responsibility across all areas of government. Nowhere in the Cabinet Manual does the term ‘CEO’ appear.

But the word Chair does. A CEO is not a Chair. A CEO reports to a Chair. John Key used to talk about New Zealand as if it was a business—NZInc—but he never resiled from his role as Chair. Luxon has the roles reversed, and in doing so has stripped himself of the authority that comes with actually being in charge. When Luxon says ‘my job is the CEO,’ he is pick ‘n mixing what he does in a self-appointed unconstitutional role. And he’s making up his responsibilities as he goes along, choosing from the standard menu familiar to his former corporate life: delegation, quarterly planning, KPIs, swim lanes. In invoking the machinery of traditional corporate accountability he’s managing to dodge anything that makes him personally accountable.

Self-defining a role is fine if you're a Founder. It's another thing when your budget is $150.3 billion and you are responsible for the welfare and security of 5.3 million people.

Public governance is not like running a company. It involves managing complex societal challenges while balancing internal and external stakeholder interests, limited resources, and intense political scrutiny. It operates under constant tension, serving a diverse public even when it isn't profitable. All made harder by short electoral cycles and very high expectations. In this space, the public is both client and the Board. Luxon can’t afford to side-step either.

What he actually said to Tova

When Breakfast host Tova O'Brien pressed Luxon a few weeks ago on what he'd been doing during the fuel crisis, Luxon replied: "My job is to make sure I've got my team on the right assignments at the right time. I've got the right group of Ministers in a room with officials with industry. We have a daily meeting around that... My job the last week has been hitting the phones hard with international leaders... I signed off on the national fuel plan... I put the ministers on the task with clarity and I expect them to crack on and get that job done."

It was an answer straight out of American leadership guru Jim Collins' From Good to Great textbook. Like many corporate CEOs, Luxon fancies himself as the driver: focused on getting the right people on the bus (and wrong people off) to ensure the team is adaptable enough to handle whatever comes its way. And without question we want the Chair of Cabinet to be choosing good, competent people to manage cabinet portfolios, especially in a crisis. But Luxon is not driving a twenty-seater. He's navigating a five-million-person-waka. And the passengers have a right to know where he's taking them. Economic growth is a means to an end. What's the end?

‘Hitting the phones’ is what salespeople do—high-volume cold calling, urgent outreach, closing deals. It's transactional. Signing off documents is transactional. These are managerial actions that CEOs default to when leading feels too hard. Does he in all honesty think that voters are impressed by this stuff?

The things a real CEO would actually do

The irony is that if Luxon genuinely were a CEO, there are things he'd be doing that he's conspicuously not doing.

A CEO can sack their deputies when they're undermining them. Luxon can't or won't remove Winston Peters or David Seymour. Coalition politics doesn't work like a corporate restructure. You cannot performance-manage Winston Peters out of the building.

A competent CEO would know the demographics of their senior leadership team, because they'd be reporting on it to their board who would be taking the need to connect their offering with the clients they service seriously. In 2024, 47% of all live births in New Zealand were Māori or Pacific. In contrast, Luxon has no Pacific Island and only one Māori National party cabinet minister. Any alert CEO presented with that data would recognise changing the demographic make-up of their senior leadership team is a ‘need to have’ not an option they can ignore. They’d see it as an opportunity to pivot to a different model of leadership—an Aotearoa-centred leadership that is less spreadsheet, more raranga.

A CEO worth the title would also be across the detail, able to speak confidently when the cameras are on without spooking the shareholders. Luxon has delegated so much that he's visibly not across the details of government. Helen Clark, John Key, Jacinda Ardern were all able to speak with passion, fluency and precision about almost anything at the drop of a hat in a way that made you trust they knew what they were talking about and believe they actually wanted the job. Clark and Key scored extraordinarily high on being in touch with ordinary New Zealanders. Luxon doesn’t enjoy that trust.

And failure to achieve all the above? If Luxon was a real CEO reporting to a real Board, and his staff engagement score was only 20.2% —his current average level of popularity in the preferred prime minister polls—the Board would be asking some very serious questions about whether he is the right person for the job.

Where Luxon is busy managing, Peters and Seymour are happy to front up with an answer to everything they're asked. That's why they run rings around Luxon. They understand that in politics, visible presence is accountability.

When Luxon does emerge from the Beehive, it's to clichéd carefully managed settings — a school visit, a factory floor, a farm, or a rugby field.

In late February, Education Minister Erica Stanford and Luxon went to a school to announce the rollout of new maths, English and science resources. I was astonished to think he, or his advisers, thought this routinely operational announcement was a Prime Ministerial act. Voters don’t want to see a CEO releasing school workbooks. They want to see their leaders being exceptional. Helen Clark at the White House. Key playing golf with Obama. Ardern at the UN with a baby. These leaders were a reflection of us — ambitious, unique, popular, listened to in the highest places.

But here's the thing — it's not entirely his fault

Luxon is out of his depth. But the real culprit is the party that put him there. When National put Luxon in as leader in December 2021, they had already trolled through four leaders in five years. They were desperate.

Consider the apprenticeship our previous prime ministers served before taking office. Bolger and Clark had eighteen years in politics. Shipley had ten. Key had six years in opposition. Ardern had nine. Luxon had three, one year as an MP followed by two as leader of the Opposition. He had never held a ministerial position. He knew virtually nothing about politics or the Treaty of Waitangi when he became National party leader. He had no time to build an internal or an external constituency.

Luxon is an apprentice Prime Minister learning on the job in public view, with no margin for error. If you're a building apprentice and you shoot a nail from a nailgun through your hand, you do it once in private, and no one aside from your contractor boss ever needs to know. If you do it in the public eye as Prime Minister, everyone knows — and they don't let you forget it.

But that doesn’t mean he should be dumped.

Our political history is littered with the wreckage of mid-term leadership changes. Mike Moore was parachuted in to replace Geoffrey Palmer as Prime Minister and ‘save the furniture’ in 1990. He didn't. Jenny Shipley engineered a caucus coup against PM Jim Bolger in 1997 while he was at an overseas conference. National still lost the following election. Changing unpopular leaders mid-term turns out to be more damaging than the problem it's meant to solve.

So National has to give Luxon what he never had: proper Prime Ministerial support. Not communications training, not leadership coaching — Prime Ministerial development. If he can't carry the vision, someone in Cabinet or caucus has to help him build one, because a party without a compelling story of where it's taking the country is just a management consultancy with a large budget.

There are seven living ex-Prime Ministers he could call on for advice: Palmer, Shipley, Clark, Key, English, Ardern and Hipkins. Yes, even Chippy, because the job is as much constitutional as it is political, and this seems to be the part Luxon is struggling with. If that’s a step too far, at the very least he could call on Geoffrey Palmer as an expert on constitutional politics. This assumes Luxon is sufficiently self-aware to take advice.

The Godfather Playbook

Helen Clark, having held off a leadership challenge in 1996, appointed her biggest internal critic, Michael Cullen, to Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister once Labour became government in 1999. It was straight out of the Michael Corleone Godfather playbook: keep your enemies closer, put them to work and you won’t be blindsided. It was a successful move. Clark and Cullen are now seen as one of the best Prime Minister and Finance Minister combinations in New Zealand's political history.

Luxon has just publicly humiliated his biggest internal detractor Chris Bishop by taking the 2026 Campaign Chair role off him. With him went Bishop supporter James Meager’s chances of promotion. That Luxon promoted Penny Simmonds to cabinet instead of Meager, after she had done one thing—dismantling the Labour government’s reform of vocational education—and done it badly, is a sign of Luxon’s recklessness and vindictiveness. That approach doesn't close wounds. It papers over them while they fester.

The job title is Prime Minister. Not CEO. Not bus driver. Not quarterly-plan coordinator. Not critic punisher.

It is the hardest job in New Zealand. It requires presence, accountability, vision, and the willingness to be publicly answerable for everything — up, down, in, and out. To Parliament. To citizens. To the party. To voters. To the media.

It’s not clear that Christopher Luxon actually wants to do the job. If he doesn’t, he should step down now to give the National party time to socialise a new leader before the 2026 election. If Luxon does want it, then he has to shed the CEO persona and step up to the constitutional role he was voted to fulfil. Before this quarter is out.