Whenever Christopher Luxon drops a classically fatuous clanger or whenever the government has a bad poll – i.e. every week – the talk resumes that he is about to be rolled. This is unlikely for several reasons. For starters, there is no successor. Nicola Willis? Chris Bishop? Simeon Brown? Mark Mitchell? Those are not compelling options. Erica Stanford would probably have most appeal to non-National voters, but they won’t be the ones making the call. The National MP who looks like a future party leader – James Meagher – has no name recognition, and has yet to be tested under pressure.

The centre-right also needs to be careful about what it wishes for. Yes, there is widespread dis-satisfaction among the leadership and party faithful about the performance of Christopher Luxon – how could there not be? – but a successful leadership change would bring a fresh set of problems in its wake.

Meaning: lets assume some populist champion could be found to inspire the caucus to topple Luxon. Any rebound in National’s fortunes – say, if it started hitting 40% or more in the polls – would be largely at the expense of its current allies, who have already been losing ground in recent polls. In the face of a resurgent National, not even Winston Peters could save New Zealand First.

The ACT Party too, would be reduced to a shadow of its current self, and would become reliant on David Seymour’s seat in Epsom, which would once again be dependent on a National Party sponsorship deal. In sum, a coup against Luxon that significantly improved National’s fortunes would leave National in the familiar position of having almost no viable friends on the centre-right.

More to the point, National’s bad polls are also a meaningless indicator of how Election 2026 will pan out. Currently, those polls are solely a measure of public displeasure with the coalition government. Since Labour has been such an invisible Opposition, it is passively benefiting from this mood of discontent. Similarly, Chris Hipkins is functioning as a placeholder as Labour leader, but the Labour faithful would be unwise to take his current polling as evidence of his electability.

Once election year cranks up...National will be making every effort to turn the campaign into being all about the alternative, and not about its own record in government. Attempts will be made to terrify the electorate with the prospect of Rawiri Waititi and Chloe Swarbrick sitting round the Cabinet table. Moreover, Labour will almost certainly be going into the next election with a capital gains tax as part of its policy mix. By contrast, National’s continued austerity policies in 2025 will give it some room for an election bribe in Budget 2026.

So the next election may well be offering voters the timeworn choice between a government offering tax cuts (partly financed in future by borrowing and more asset sales) and an alleged “tax and spend” Opposition. Surely, not even Christopher Luxon could blow such a contest.

Wooing India, Badly

India doesn’t treat foreign access to its dairy sector as being negotiable. Australia had to rule dairy out of its FTA with India, and here’s what India’s trade minister had to say on the subject in late October last year:

A free-trade deal between India and the European Union cannot be agreed upon if there is an insistence on getting access to the Asian country’s dairy sector. India’s trade minister Piyush Goyal said on Friday. Goyal said a trade deal between the two can be done fast, if sensitivities are respected on both sides.

And again, in September 2024:

Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal said dairy is a sensitive sector in India as it involves livelihood issues of small farmers and there are no plans to give duty concessions under any Free Trade Agreement (FTA) in this area. He said India has not given any duty concessions in the dairy sector even to Switzerland and Norway under the EFTA (European Free Trade Association) trade pact, which was signed in March.

At the utmost, limited access for only a handful of farm items not produced in India were reportedly offered to Australia by India. Yet for his own domestic political reasons, PM Christopher Luxon is not respecting India’s sensitivities on this matter. Instead, Luxon has prioritised not pissing off New Zealand farmers, and has chosen to not manage their expectations by telling them that dairy exports are a lost cause in the context of an FTA with India.

So...we’re putting dairy onto the FTA negotiating table regardless – even though this will only annoy India, and prolong the search for a mutually acceptable FTA outcome. Another victory on the world stage for Christopher Luxon!

Footnote One: No doubt, New Zealand will be using our international education sector as a bargaining chip – both when it comes to exporting our expertise in this area to India, and in offering more Indian students access to our own schools and universities.

On that last point, India will be – and should be – cautious, given our terrible treatment of Indian students during the 2010s. Basically, we allowed education agents to falsely dangle the lure of residency in front of prospective Indian students, encouraged these hopefuls to put their family life savings into this quest, pocketed their fees, and then kicked them out. The students were sent home penniless and in disgrace to their families.

So...what guarantees will Luxon’s negotiators be offering in the international education area, to re-assure India that this shameful episode in our history is not going to be repeated?

Footnote Two: On agricultural trade, India has its own domestic priorities. It can’t afford to let foreign imports wipe out the hundreds of millions of small farmers who would be devastated by “free trade” in agriculture, and then sent hungry and displaced into India’s cities to swell the tanks of the nation’s beggars. No sane Indian leader would survive allowing free trade to cause social carnage on the scale likely if India reduced its trade barriers in agriculture to any significant extent.

Here's the situation. Reportedly, 80% of India’s farmers work on very small patches of land. The average farm is less than two hectares, on which there are about 3 or 4 livestock. Small farm holdings constitute roughly a third of the country’s cultivated land, and that land produces about 40% of India’s food grains. You can see the scale of the threat posed by significant dairy imports from the likes of New Zealand.

On 2020 data, gathered in Australia for their FTA, only some 5.2 % of Indian farmers own a tractor, and the rest are reliant on traditional labour intensive methods of production. Even so, these farms – despite the lack of modern technology – have been estimated to be more productive than India’s medium-sized or large farms.

For most of India’s farmers it is said to be a subsistence existence, with little or nothing left over for investments beyond the meeting of daily needs. The utility of NZ farming know-how in the context of these FTA talks will depend on the transferability of our farm expertise (a) to the type of cows common in India, and to (b) the type of hot, dry and poorly productive terrain typical of much of rural India.

Bon Iver and friend

The Haim sisters have just released a new single called “Relationships” and the light, summery melody (and production) is belied by the quiet desperation in the lyrics. Overall though, I prefer this week’s new Bon Iver track, on which Danielle Haim’s vocals perfectly complement Justin Vernon in another song about living in a relationship in which for whatever reason – fear maybe? – at least one of them senses that they’re moving at a different pace:

If only I could wait

But before me is a ways out

Can I live inside this state?

Where the summers are charades now

Can I incur the weight?

Am I really this afraid now?

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