The obstacle is the way out

There's a reason Paul Goldsmith sits sixth on the National Party list and now holds 11 portfolios. Like his politics or not, he is articulate about the targets he is to deliver, unwavering in his conviction that his reforms are right and true-blue in his loyalty to the National party. When questioned by Jack Tame on Q+A last weekend about why the National caucus has consistently backed Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, Goldsmith was quick to list off a range of positive personal and political traits:

1.         He’s in politics for the right reasons, he wants New Zealand to succeed.

2.         He’s a reformer, he doesn’t just stand around and look after the status quo... he’s making a difference.

3.         He’s a hustler, he’s out on the world stage. That deal with India, no other PM would have pulled it off.

“He also manages complex issues well, he’s a CEO, he knows how to get performance out of the leaders, and he’s a decent guy, a decent New Zealander, a family man. So that is why we support him, he’s a strong leader, he’s a good Prime Minister and if he gets two more terms he’ll be a great Prime Minister.”

Jack Tame moved off and asked if he thought Chris Penk was acting alone in the leadership challenge which allowed Goldy to disingenuously profess no idea.

A better approach would have been for Tame to say: It may be true that Luxon possesses all those qualities. However, being a decent guy doesn’t necessarily mean he’s the right person to lead National to victory in 2026.

Decency is not a strategy

Novice punters back a horse because it has a nice name, or nice colours, or it's carrying their lucky number. Experienced punters look at form. On form, Luxon leading National to victory is a poor bet for the caucus to have placed.

Admittedly, Decent Luxon has made it extremely difficult for the caucus to place a bet any other way. The moment he’s sensed a whiff of challenge he’s swiftly cut any contenders off before they can even get out of the gates.

But is it an election-winning strategy?

Most people make their vote choices based on long-term party identification (habit), social class, policy platforms, and the state of the economy. These factors are pretty much baked into current polling numbers. But some voters use their impression of a leader – their perceived competence, integrity, decisiveness, and empathy – as a cognitive shortcut (heuristic) to evaluate the party as a whole.

Perceptions of leaders can shift the election outcome by 2-4 percent. And while that doesn’t sound like a lot, in an extremely close and competitive election, like this one is, even a small leadership effect can influence an election outcome.

I’m currently playing around with a dynamic election prediction model with the assistance of Google Gemini AI. I will share it, but not yet as it’s still a bit buggy. By the model’s calculations, Luxon – as a not particularly popular Prime Minister who has had a lot of negative press in the last couple of weeks – is currently a 2-point drag on National’s underlying baseline vote. Even if Luxon pulls his socks up, the model has calculated that for the coalition to unlock the extra vote share required to secure the required seats for a majority, that leadership score needs to jump by eight points into positive territory (+6%). That is twice the number of points that leadership effects usually have on voter decision-making.

Can an incumbent carrying this much baggage and bad press make the eight point leap under three months? Highly improbable. Can a brand-new leader make it? Yes – we saw it when Jacinda Ardern took over Labour leadership from Andrew Little seven weeks out from the 2017 election. Can the Ardern effect strike twice? Probably not. But at least there's a chance. With Luxon there is none.

And yet the National caucus has put its money on a decent horse hanging in the race over the chance of a newer filly reaching the line. Which begs the question: why would a caucus unite behind the decent guy instead of doing the maths on what it takes to win in 2026? The maths that only one of its members – Chris Penk – seems to have calculated, and suffered for it.

The standard answer last week was that a bloody public coup three months out looks like chaos, and chaos loses elections. Stability was the safer bet over an untested replacement that might not fire.

To that I'd add a cultural layer. Unlike Australia, which has no shame about rolling sitting prime ministers, we aren't a ruthless political culture. We find the whole business a bit distasteful, un-Kiwi, a little shameful. We think leadership changes should be amicable, that naked ambition is a character flaw best kept behind closed doors rather than paraded. Doubly so if you're a woman. When ambition does show itself, we frame it as a risk, not an opportunity.

Beneath that sits the good-bloke premium. We judge leaders on relatability and character far more than on cold competence, and ‘decent’ has been a term of national praise for decades. To say out loud ‘he's a good man but he can't win, so he has to go’ feels like a breach of the good-Kiwi-bloke code. National, it seems, would rather lose the 2026 election with a decent man at the helm than admit that winning is something politicians are meant to challenge each other to do.

A leader trained not to listen

The paradox is that a decent bloke, doing the decent thing, would be the first to admit he isn't the man to continue in the race. Andrew Little did. Joe Biden eventually did. How decent is it, really, to hang on knowing it may bring your own government down?

Well here’s the thing. The question is nowhere near Luxon's radar. For Luxon, quitting is simply not an option. 

His whole CEO story is as the turnaround man, the Air New Zealand fixer. The chief executive who doesn't walk out because one quarter looks bad. He digs in behind the strategy and sees it through. In the corporate world, quitting under pressure is a failure of nerve – right up until the board asks you to go. Staying the course, sorting things out and moving on is Luxon’s primary mantra.

Then there’s hubris – or his blindness to it. In 2006 the neurologist and former British politician Lord David Owen coined the term ‘Hubris Syndrome’ after studying how high office changes people. Its markers include an inability to take feedback or self-correct, reading criticism as disloyalty rather than data, and a contempt for process. Owen found that such leaders cannot see their own mistakes and believe they can do no wrong.

This will be why Luxon treats questions about his leadership not as a sign of eroding trust, but insubordination. Why he has twice prevented leadership challenges from arising in his caucus and why he proclaims to not have asked Penk why he questioned his leadership.

Even Luxon’s latest self-assessment expressed in his normal Monday morning chinwag with Mike Hosking on NewstalkZB came laced with a huge dose of the syndrome. He admitted: “I’m grossly imperfect. Under pressure, we all make mistakes, and when I make them I should call it out and say so”. But he then blamed the political media and the scrum environment for people’s poor perception about him.

There’s also an element of the Stoic in his approach. Luxon has spent many hours in airports over his career, and airport bookshops are where you find Ryan Holiday. A former marketing strategist turned author – the man most responsible for repackaging ancient Stoicism as modern self-help – and he's written a shelf of bestsellers on applying it to work, ego and adversity. His best known is The Obstacle Is the Way. He's all over my feed promoting his latest book which is probably why I’m thinking stoicism in relation to Luxon. It's a philosophy big on courage and endurance: don't flinch, control the distractions, run your own race, don't be governed by the noise.

Luxon even used the word ‘noise’ in his Hosking chat on Monday:

“I choose to do this job because I am connected to the mission and purpose of this country realising its potential… As a result, and maybe that’s a fault, ever since I came here, I don’t really listen to the noise.”

The discipline that enables Luxon to treat the caucus and news media as external noise to be silenced is the same discipline that stops him hearing what the caucus and news media are telling him. Marcus Aurelius warned against being governed by the opinions of others. In a democracy, however, the opinions of others aren't obstacles to transcend. They are the mechanism of public accountability.

It looks like there will be no further talk about National leadership between now and the election. That race meet has been abandoned. But when the election campaign is dissected after 7 November, the National caucus will need to ask itself why, whether by choice or by coercion, they picked risking losing the 2026 election over rolling a decent man.