London: New Zealand has become fearful, inward and negative as a result of its COVID settings and owes its expatriates an apology for locking them out during the pandemic, Christopher Luxon, the man vying to oust Prime Minister Jacinda Arden, has said.
New Zealand’s opposition leader made the comments in a wide-ranging interview with The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in London.
New Zealand National Party leader Christopher Luxon at the London office of Kiwi digital creative agency TG on Friday.Credit:Domenio Pugliese
Both Ardern and Luxon have been hitting the world stage in the past week.
Luxon said his trip to Singapore, Ireland and the UK had been a fact-finding mission on how to re-engage with the rest of the world, and that New Zealand’s trading relationships had suffered as a result of its closed border policy mentality and mindset.
“I hope it’s temporary,” he said.
“That’s why I want to catalyse and tap into some re-energy for New Zealand because I do feel we’ve played a very fearful, a very negative, a very inward game over the last few years and actually, we have lost that ability.
“We get rich by doing business around the world not by selling things to each other in New Zealand.”
Luxon wants New Zealand to urgently welcome more temporary and permanent migrants to boost productivity and alleviate inflation. He has flagged an overhaul of New Zealand’s working holiday visa, extending the eligibility age from 30 to 35 and allowing repeat visits.
“We’ve got massive skills gaps everywhere, we’ve got to open the place up,” he said.
“And the accompanying piece to that is making sure we’ve got the infrastructure to support it as well because we’ve done a poor job of syncing those two bits together.
“But yeah, we’re very pro-immigration.”
He pointed to the trade partnerships that Australia and Britain had signed with India as an example of where New Zealand had lapsed.
“We just haven’t been out and about hustling as we would have been in the past,” he said.
He praised Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong for her “impressive” travel schedule since Labor won office, saying she had set an example for her New Zealand counterpart, and also praised Ardern’s travel to Europe for the recent NATO summit and talks in London, and the dialogue in Sydney.
“It’s actually her job as our chief salesperson to go off and do that job well,” he said.
“And we need to do that because we actually are restarting post-COVID. It’s not a rebuild, it’s a restart.
“It’s about not taking an assumption that everything’s going to come back as it once was.”
New Zealand was one of the first democracies to eliminate community transmission of COVID-19 through harsh lockdowns and shutting borders, at times, even to its own citizens.
It was a policy that Australian governments copied in July 2020. The measures made it costly and sometimes impossible for citizens of both countries to return home, even in desperate circumstances.
Ardern’s approach gained worldwide attention when the Kiwi journalist Charlotte Bellis revealed she’d had to turn to the Taliban for sanctuary to deliver her baby because she was struggling to return to her homeland.
Luxon, who ran Air New Zealand and rose through the ranks at Unilever after beginning his career in Wellington, has worked in Sydney, London, Chicago and Toronto. He said the treatment of Kiwis overseas during the pandemic was “cruel and brutal” and had exposed a first- and second-class category of citizenship.
“You’ve got a million overseas at any one point in time, so it’s a team of 6 million not 5 million,” he said, referring to Ardern’s rallying cry to New Zealand’s “team of 5 million” to inspire lockdown compliance.
“First and foremost, we think the government should apologise – just acknowledge that we got it wrong – that would be a good first step.
Spaces in government-managed isolation and quarantine facilities were limited during New Zealand’s pandemic border closures.Credit:AP
“And then I think there is a good conversation to be had about making sure that that wouldn’t happen again.”
He said a ministry could be made responsible for the Kiwi diaspora as well as loosening the rules that forbid Kiwis from voting in elections if they haven’t been home in the previous three years.
Luxon took over as leader in November last year and his party has surged in the polls, with the opposition leading for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic.
He rejected suggestions that his “stale, male, pale” characteristics would be a drawback against Ardern.
“There’s no doubt the prime minister has great communication skills, but New Zealanders want more than that,” he said.
He said he was focusing on fielding a diverse list of candidates at the next election, saying his commercial experience had proven that diversity brought with it “richer thinking”.
He pledged to approach politics with civility, identifying it as the key to staving off the political instability that had infected Australian, British and American politics.
“I always believe you can disagree without being disagreeable and I know that might sound trite, but it is actually really serious,” he said.
“The reason I’ve come into politics is because I care deeply about my country and I want the country to realise maximum potential, economically, socially and environmentally.”
New Zealand is expected to go to the polls late next year.
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