Christopher Luxon has been trailing in recent polls. Photo: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
"Is this a trend? Is this something you start to freak out about?" Newstalk ZB's Ryan Bridge asked Jordan Williams of the Taxpayers Union (TPU) last Monday.
Its latest monthly poll had just showed the governing coalition trailing the opposition parties and Christopher Luxon was not as popular as his own party.
"I don't freak out about it. I don't have a pony in this race. I run a humble taxpayer's group," Williams replied.
But the group does pony up for the most regular political public opinion polls these days, carried out by the pollster the National Party uses - Curia, which is led by TPU founder-member David Farrar.
And those polls now fill a void for the cash-strapped news media.
"In the last couple of years we've seen the downfall of public polling from the mainstream media outlets," ZB political editor Jason Walls explained on air last Monday.
"The Curia poll funded by the Taxpayers Union comes out every month. We put a lot of stock in it. It is almost our main bellwether for tracking where political parties are at," Walls said.
The media certainly seized on this latest one.
"I hear there's a poll coming and National might be plunging. For Luxon's sake, they better be 30-plus. Below that, we're in Bridges country," left-leaning lobbyist David Cormack said on social media.
The National Party support slumping to that level prompted Simon Bridges to be rolled as leader five years ago.
That was accompanied by a slew of 'Dead Man Walking' media commentaries, peaking with Newshub asking people to sum up the struggling leader in a single word.
'Dick' and 'dickhead' were prominent in the subsequent word cloud Newshub showed viewers of the 6pm TV news.
Photo: screenshot
But this week the Luxon-led National Party was actually up 1.7 percent in latest poll.
Newstalk ZB's Mike Hosking dismissed the poll findings as "not real".
"The Greens up 3 percent to 10 percent? They have grown almost a third more support have they? That hasn't happened," he told his listeners.
It had not.
The Greens went down 3 percent to 10 percent, in line with a drop for co-leader Chloe Swarbrick as preferred PM.
But the poll did show an uptick in the opposition parties put together - and the trend for National since December is downward.
"A real summer of discontent," reckoned Newsroom's Tim Murphy, while Stuff's political correspondent Jenna Lynch also saw it seasonally.
"There's two whole winters between now and (an election). Winters are when discontent sets in and 2025's winter follows a summer of dissatisfaction," she said on Monday.
"The question for Luxon is: can he pull something off short term to calm the chatter in the commentator columns?"
That's tough on two counts: the country's problems are big and long-term ones - and the commentators' chatter is more like a roar in the media right now, aped by claims Christopher Luxon is not cutting through in the media.
"Christopher Luxon may have a great sausage, but he's not selling its sizzle," said Newstalk ZB's Kerre Woodham, co-opting an antique maxim from the world of advertising.
Roll over Luxon?
"The poor (TPU poll) numbers might explain an uptick in rumours and speculation over the weekend that Luxon could be pushed out of the top job before the next election or even the end of the year," said Dan Brunskill of interest.co.nz.
Rumours and speculation from where exactly?
"Duncan Garner, a once well-informed political reporter, wrote in the Listener magazine that discussions about replacing Luxon were already taking place. Though the article was highly speculative and lacked concrete evidence," Brunskill wrote.
It wasn't the only one published by the Listener this week.
"Nationals MPs are not ready to talk about leadership change, but they are talking about the trigger points that might lead to it," its politics columnist Danyl McLachlan wrote in the latest issue.
Garner was much more definitive in his own daily Mediaworks podcast 'Editor in Chief'.
"National MPs are openly now talking about his downfall and plotting his downfall," Garner said on the show after the poll result on Monday.
But while no MPs are doing that in the open, Garner has been forecasting Luxon's demise all month.
"The next major announcement from Luxon will be his resignation as Prime Minister. Privately MPs are now discussing how to roll him and who takes over," Garner said back on 5 March.
"The whispering campaign in Wellington about his weak and indecisive leadership has gone to a new level, with National MPs now talking about not if he must be replaced, but when - and who takes the job."
He did not say which MPs - presumably to preserve confidentiality. But how many? How senior? And how far down the track have they got?
It was a whispering campaign about a whispering campaign, to use Garner's own words.
On 7 March Garner cited an early childhood teacher who had written to the PM alarmed about 3- to 5-year-olds becoming trans preschoolers - according to equally alarmed lobby group Family First which made the letter public.
"Luxon and his staff needed to write back to say he too stands against this and that no one on his watch is going to talk or act in such a way that this is viable and acceptable," Garner said.
But if the public is turning off Luxon as a leader, it is more likely to be because of the economy, the health system and school lunches than a single reply his office staff sent to an individual citizen concerned about preschoolers' gender identification.
If Luxon had responded as Garner suggested, it is a fair bet that would prompt media commentary saying his energies were not going where they ought to be in troubled times.
Meanwhile, Garner put his considerable energy into writing off Luxon's leadership in the following days.
On another editors in chief show, former National minister Maurice Williamson told Garner that Luxon should follow Trump's lead on diversity, equity and inclusion.
A few days later on the show, professional property investor and former National Party candidate Ashley Church also said Luxon was not capable of emulating Trump.
"I think before Christmas he'll be gone. I've defended him on the basis that he would come right, and grow into the role. I've completely changed my view on that now," Church told Garner.
Church had already said 'Luxon must go' three months earlier on LinkedIn, citing what he called Luxon's failure to stand by Israel.
"I've never thought he was any good," said Garner's other guest on the show that day, Matthew Hooton.
In a long and intense airing of Luxon's perceived shortcomings, Hooton - a former lobbyist and adviser to National who helped Todd Muller replace Simon Bridges as leader in 2020 - even cited Luxon's lacklustre results in the seventh form.
"I know this is terribly snobby and unkind, but he went to Christchurch Boys High and he got a 'B' bursary. The only way to get that at a school like Auckland Grammar or Christchurch Boys or Wellington College back in the 1980s, was to be a bit thick and not show up."
Hooton and Garner's claims about Luxon hit home with commentator Chris Trotter.
"This sort of commentary would be much easier for conservatives to dismiss were it coming from the usual left wing suspects. If the centre, let alone the right, cannot hold, then things are most certainly falling apart," he wrote at at interest.co nz.
But on Newsroom.co.nz, former minister Peter Dunne said these were just "inevitable mutterings from nervous nellies on a government's backbench when their party slips in the polls. Luxon is not about to be rolled by his caucus."
Veteran observer Richard Harman said so too.
On his site Politik.co.nz, he said two separate (but unnamed) sources had said concerns have been raised with National Chief Whip Stuart Smith earlier this year at informal Wednesday night sessions of National's backbench MPs.
"Smith's advice reportedly was that the transaction cost of changing the leader now would be too high."
Harman said another anonymous MP told Politik: "people do talk, but at present that's all they are doing."
This weekend, New Zealand Herald political editor Claire Trevett said "questions about the stability of Luxon's leadership were nothing more than questions, despite unsuccessful bids to fish out disgruntled backbenchers."
"Believe me, when there is actual discontent and instability in a caucus with a backbench the size of National's, it becomes very obvious very quickly," she said.
"These rumours often surface when poll numbers are low and shouldn't be taken too seriously," Dan Brunskill wrote on Interest.co.nz
"However, those who dismissed speculation about Jacinda Ardern's 2023 resignation were ultimately proven wrong," he added.
True.
But when her successor Chris Hipkins lost that election heavily, pundits also said with certainty he would have to go as leader.
But right now he's still the leader of a Labour Party that's ahead in the polls - and ahead as preferred prime minister.
Another irony is that five years after Newshub declared that National Party leader Simon Bridges was a dead man walking (and a dickhead, according to some), it is Newshub that has died and its reporting of Bridges' poll problems in the past is now nowhere to be found.
But less than a year ago, Bridges topped a Curia opinion poll asking Aucklanders who they fancied as their next mayor.
Pundits prompted by polls are not always right, but they do give each other points to opine about in the absence of information on the record.
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