Christopher Luxon: The full story of the man who wants to be PM

After a rapid ascent to the top of the National Party, Christopher Luxon is still relatively unknown to many voters. Over the past month, investigations editor Alex Spence spoke at length to the Opposition leader
and those closest to him to find out what makes him tick – and how he would proceed if he got into power after October’s general election.

EARLIER THIS WEEK: Audrey Young: Chris Hipkins’ life story – mum reveals how a ‘quite different’ child got into politics

On a Monday evening in Blenheim, Christopher Luxon ducks into a nearly empty wine bar looking for a quiet place to make a phone call.

The National Party leader – a former chief executive of Air New Zealand – has been following a relentless campaign schedule, holding events up and down the country to persuade voters to return his party to government in October after six sometimes calamitous years in opposition.

Luxon started the day in Auckland, flew to Blenheim, drove to Kaikōura and back, and now has 45 minutes before his next event. He doesn’t waste it drinking wine. At 53, Luxon doesn’t consume alcohol, or coffee or tea, and lately he’s also been trying to break his habit of drinking Pepsi Max. He asks the staff to turn the music down and attends to his next pressing task, a call with a journalist.

“It’s great. It’s good. It’s really good,” he says when the journalist asks if he’s enjoying being on the road. “I’m loving it. Absolutely loving it.”

Even in his downtime between campaign events, Luxon is always on.

Since he was a teenager, according to family, friends and former colleagues, Luxon has possessed preternatural energy and self-discipline. He sleeps fewer than five hours a night. He is fanatical about setting goals, adopts mental frameworks for everything from recruiting staff to raising children, and drives himself so hard he says he can “compress time”.

“He has a more prodigious work rate than anyone else I can think of,” says Sir John Key, the former prime minister and a close friend.

Luxon devours biographies of world leaders, looking for insights on developing his leadership skills and personal productivity. He is an avid consumer of self-help books.

Focus on the things you can control. Organise and execute around priorities. Luxon has fully embraced the lessons of various management gurus and shares them with an almost missionary zeal. He once gave a copy of Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People to a clerk at the store where he bought his suits. He gave a copy of Jim Collins’ Good to Great to Act leader David Seymour.

Luxon’s relentless drive for self-improvement has propelled him from a childhood in the suburbs of Christchurch and East Auckland to executive jobs with Unilever, one of the world’s biggest consumer goods producers, in Sydney, London, Chicago and Toronto. It made him one of New Zealand’s best-known corporate bosses, earning more than $4 million a year at Air New Zealand.

It took him from being a newly elected member of Parliament for the Auckland seat of Botany in October 2020 to leader of the Opposition just a year later.

And it may soon, if recent opinion polls are to be believed, make him our next prime minister.

Talk to Luxon’s allies and they’ll tell you he is a businessman with a unique set of leadership skills and a track record of fixing difficult problems: a capitalist with a conscience motivated by a higher purpose to improve people’s lives even when he was climbing the corporate career ladder.

It is an image that Luxon – who made his living as a brand development expert selling products from deodorants to mayonnaise – has worked assiduously to cultivate. But with under three months to go to the October 14 election, even his allies concede that the sales pitch hasn’t resonated as deeply with a weary electorate as he might have hoped.

While polls suggest that National could be on track to lead the next government, political analysts say this is more a product of voters’ underlying concerns about the economy under Labour than an endorsement of Luxon himself. With half of voters saying the country is heading in the wrong direction, they say National should be streaking ahead.

“He’s almost single-handedly keeping Labour in the game,” says one political adviser.

While National has put forward a raft of policy ideas, some more thoughtful and well-evidenced than others, few seem to have yet cut through the campaign noise.

Luxon himself has persistently lagged Chris Hipkins in polling for the public’s preferred prime minister and has been hounded by questions about his wealth (notably his ownership of seven homes, including four investment properties) and his conservative views on abortion. Critics say Luxon comes across as out of touch with the hard-pressed voters who are likely to decide the election, particularly women.

Despite his experience in branding and communications, he tends to speak in corporate jargon and rehearsed talking points that can come across as wooden. Ask Luxon why he entered politics, for example, and without hesitation he reels off a soundbite that he has delivered many times in interviews, speeches and advertisements: “I had a regular Kiwi upbringing. I think I did well. I’m a recipient of a New Zealand system that prepared me to go out into the world and do well. And I want that for every Kiwi kid.”

“He’s relentlessly on-message,” says Neale Jones, a lobbyist and former chief of staff to Jacinda Ardern, “but I think sometimes he’s so relentlessly on script that he comes across as a bit inauthentic.”

When Luxon has strayed from his talking points, he has at times entangled himself in controversy. A comment to Newstalk ZB in March last year in which he appeared to suggest that the Government helping the poor was “bottom feeding” went down particularly badly in focus groups, political advisers say.

Perhaps Luxon’s biggest problem, though, is that, for a man hoping to become prime minister in a few months’ time, he remains relatively unknown.

Compared to most other party leaders, his time in politics has been incredibly brief. Although he has appeared almost daily in the media in recent weeks, many people say they simply don’t know much about him or what makes him tick.

“It’s coming time when people need to know you,” a cafe owner told Luxon when he did a campaign walkabout in the Wellington suburb of Tawa this month. “We don’t know who you are.”

So, who is Christopher Luxon? Over the past month, the Herald has spoken at length to Luxon, some of the people closest to him, former colleagues, political advisers, pollsters and many others, and conducted an extensive examination of his record, to better understand some of the questions that hang over his campaign: Where does his relentless ambition come from? Why did he enter politics? And how would he proceed if he gets into power?

A ‘regular Kiwi upbringing’

Luxon’s “regular Kiwi upbringing” began in Burnside, Christchurch, in July 1970.

He is the eldest of three sons born to Graham and Kathleen Luxon. His younger brothers, Matthew and Karl, are both successful in their own fields: Matthew runs a waste-recovery charity and Karl is chief executive of a hotel chain.

Graham had a “tough” upbringing in Christchurch, Luxon says. His father, once a groundskeeper at Hagley Park, was an alcoholic who died at 60. Luxon has said that seeing his grandfather drunk when he was young influenced his decision never to drink alcohol.

Graham was a sales rep for Johnson & Johnson, the consumer products company, when Luxon was young. He is a “born optimist”, Luxon says.

“He taught me that your circumstances don’t define where you’re going.”

Kathleen, who also grew up in Canterbury, the daughter of a school principal, was a receptionist before Luxon was born and a stay-at-home mother while he was young. In later years she went to university to study social work and is now a counsellor. Luxon describes her as a “real people person” with a strong sense of justice.

Luxon’s parents married and had children in their early 20s. They didn’t have a lot of money when he was growing up, he says, but were loving parents and generous to others. They were not openly political – he says he can’t remember who they voted for – but there were often spirited discussions around the family table about social issues.

The Luxons went to church every Sunday. Both parents were raised Roman Catholic and Luxon was initiated into the church and sent early to Catholic primary schools, but the family later became Baptists. (In later years, Luxon has belonged to Presbyterian, Anglican and non-denominational churches. His parents have returned to the Anglican Church.) “Church wasn’t 100 per cent of our lives, but it was a piece of our lives,” Luxon says.

When Luxon was 6, Graham got a job in Auckland as general manager of Selleys Chemicals. The family moved to Howick. Luxon attended five schools in Auckland in a decade. Then, when he was 15, the family moved back to Christchurch after Graham got a sales job at a pet food company.

If these changes were unsettling, Luxon doesn’t admit to it. He talks about his childhood sentimentally. “I was very fortunate and blessed,” he says.

Were there any moments of major hardship or adversity?

“No, not really. No, there wasn’t.”

Luxon spent his final three school years at Christchurch Boys’ High School. He was a “good all-rounder” as a student, he says: diligent and capable academically, decent at sports. Classmates recall him as “inconspicuous” at a school whose star pupils included cricketer Chris Cairns and future All Black Andrew Mehrtens.

“He was one of those guys who was just one of the guys,” says Glenn Judson, an agricultural scientist who was in Luxon’s year. Luxon was smart and well-liked, Judson recalls, but he didn’t stand out. “He was what I would class as a quiet achiever … Just very normal.”

In 1988, Luxon’s senior year at Christchurch Boys’, he was one of 19 monitors, according to a school yearbook. He was nicknamed “Ronald” because he worked after school at McDonald’s; he played hockey and squash; and he won a prize for debating. He achieved a “B” Bursary in his final exams.

Outside school, Luxon’s social life revolved around youth groups affiliated to the Avonhead Baptist Church, according to his wife Amanda, 54, who also belonged to the congregation.

Luxon was 15 when they first met, at a youth group dinner. Amanda, whose parents owned a grocery store, was 20 months older. She recalls being struck by Luxon’s maturity: “He sort of always knew what he wanted to do and what he wanted to be,” she says. “He was quite focused and driven.”

Luxon and Amanda were friends for several years before they started dating. They married in 1994 at St Andrew’s College chapel in Christchurch.

Luxon was fascinated by politics as a young man and figured he might someday seek public office, although nothing in his interviews with the Herald suggests he had firm ideological views or was aligned with any causes or parties back then. It was a career in business that most appealed to the young Luxon.

As a kid, he was industrious. He washed windows, mowed lawns and delivered newspapers. He worked for McDonald’s through secondary school and then got a job as a porter at Christchurch’s Park Royal Hotel, which helped support him at university. During school holidays, he attended lectures that his father delivered at a management school and read all the motivational books Graham assigned to his salesforce. “I’ve always been curious about how you improve performance,” he says.

At 17, Luxon told his future mother-in-law that his life’s ambition was to someday work in the US. He wanted to prove himself in the “most sophisticated business environment in the world”, he told her.

In 1989, he enrolled in a Bachelor of Commerce degree at the University of Canterbury, making him the first person in his family to go to university. He went on to do a master’s, finished university in 1992 and was offered a place in a management training programme at Unilever. (Amanda became a primary school teacher and in later years worked as a consultant.)

Unilever, based in London, sought the “best and brightest” graduates around the world and then inculcated them into a unified corporate culture through a process it called “Unileverisation”, its chief executive wrote in the Harvard Business Review at the time.

For Luxon, it was an opportunity to gain a business education and travel overseas. “I wanted to learn and move around the world and work around the world.”

When he finished the training scheme, he was put into a sales job in Auckland. Then Unilever made him a manager in its homecare business in Wellington, which produced cleaning products such as Jif and Handy Andy. He was 22.

“I got a reputation quite early on for getting results,” Luxon says. Soon enough, he got his wish to move overseas.

Sydney, London, America: ‘He knew exactly what he wanted to be’

Five years in Sydney. Three years in London. Then, in 2003, a decade into his career at Unilever, the company sent Luxon to Chicago to be a brand development director in its North American deodorant business.

By this time, Luxon was in his early 30s and he and Amanda had two young kids, William and Olivia. (William, now 23, lives in Auckland, and Olivia, 21, in Melbourne. “We talk to them every day,” Luxon says.) The family settled in the Chicago suburbs, where Luxon embraced Midwestern life, developing an interest in country music and Nascar racing.

Unilever was trailing its American rival Procter & Gamble in the US anti-perspirant market at the time, and Luxon went in with a mission to help make it No 1. In 2005, he oversaw a marketing campaign for a new deodorant range, Degree for Men, which involved developing Unilever’s first commercial for the annual Super Bowl TV broadcast, the most sought-after spot in American advertising.

The 30-second action hero spoof featured a doll named “Mama’s Boy”, whose friends were “The Wuss” and “The SuckUp”. “He never sweats because he doesn’t risk leaving his Mama,” a voiceover said. Some critics were uneasy about the sexist overtones, but the product was successful and Luxon’s standing in the company grew.

As a Kiwi, Luxon was an oddity in a competitive market dominated by Ivy League graduates, but he distinguished himself by his work ethic, international mindset and leadership style, says a former colleague.

Kevin George, general manager of the deodorant business at the time, shared an office with Luxon. “He was a breath of fresh air in that market,” George says.

“He was super-transparent and not afraid to have difficult conversations with people, hold them accountable.”

It was clear to George back then, he says, that Luxon had ambitions to someday return to New Zealand to contribute to public life, although they did not talk in specifics.

“Christopher’s a planner,” George says. “He knew exactly what he wanted to be and what he wanted to do from the time he was 10 years old.”

Akshay Rao, a professor at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, met Luxon when he joined the advisory board of a marketing think-tank that Rao chaired. Rao says Luxon struck him as a “lovely chap” and they often talked about cricket. “Very charming. Very friendly,” he recalls.

“But also, extremely sharp when we would get into an issue. I remember very clearly; he was tough as nails. He was not a pushover.”

Asked about his time at Unilever, Luxon portrays himself as an enlightened executive who was unafraid to make tough, clear-eyed commercial decisions but was always “respectful” to the people who might be impacted by them.

Luxon has a sunny view of capitalism and the capacity of multinational corporations to be a force for good. He pushes back when asked whether his pursuit of success in the corporate realm was consistent with his maxim to always serve a higher purpose in life.

Unilever was a progressive company that was ahead of the game on the ethical, environmental and social sustainability agendas that would later become fashionable, Luxon says. “We believed very strongly that we were part of a society, and that actually businesses could do things that government and community organisations couldn’t do.”

Would he have worked for, say, a tobacco or mining company? A Wall Street bank? A private equity firm?

“No, no, no, I could never do that, no. I think businesses have a role to play in society to strengthen the society they’re part of. They can’t just be extractive and take from society. They have to be able to give something back.”

Back to Aotearoa

In January 2009, Unilever sent Luxon to Toronto to run its Canadian operation. Two years later, he was sent to Unilever’s office in New York and the family were preparing to join him. But this time, they were conflicted.

By now, Luxon was nearly 40 and had been out of New Zealand for about 15 years. William and Olivia were approaching secondary school age. Luxon and Amanda wanted them to know what it was like to live Down Under. They were uneasy about sending them to high schools in New York.

“A lot of our values didn’t necessarily align with the American values,” Amanda says.

“We wanted our children to be less self-centred, basically, than what the American culture produces. And we could see that secondary school was going to take them in a very different route than what we wanted them to go in.”

The Luxons figured they would spend three years in New York and then relocate to New Zealand. Then in May 2010, Luxon went to a presentation in Toronto by an executive search consultant. The recruiter was also a Kiwi and they got talking about opportunities in New Zealand.

Several months later, the headhunter called Luxon and told him Air New Zealand was looking for executives. In December 2010, Luxon flew to Auckland to meet Rob Fyfe, the airline’s chief executive. He met its chairman, John Palmer, in Nelson, soon after. The Luxons abandoned their plans to move to New York and returned to New Zealand.

Luxon joined Air New Zealand in June 2011. Initially, he was head of the airline’s international operations, but he arrived expecting to eventually become chief executive. When Fyfe stepped down a year later, Luxon was one of two candidates considered by the board. He was promoted to the top job in June 2012.

Luxon has always been calculating about his career choices, seeking out roles that advanced his personal goals, and it was not lost on him that running Air New Zealand could be advantageous to a future political career.

As the airline’s chief executive, Luxon would oversee one of the country’s best-known and most trusted brands. Not only would he be a player in the corporate world. He would have a higher public profile than most business executives in New Zealand and close contact with the government and politicians.

The company Luxon inherited had been through a turbulent period. In 2001, Air New Zealand suffered the biggest corporate loss in New Zealand and was bailed out by the government. It endured years of painful rebuilding. But by the time Luxon took over, it had returned to profitability.

Under Luxon, its financial performance continued to improve. In the seven years he was chief executive, Air New Zealand’s annual pre-tax profits more than doubled, peaking at $663 million in 2016, and its market value also grew substantially.

In many ways, Luxon’s timing was fortunate: profits were boosted by lower fuel costs and Luxon didn’t have to confront the calamities that happened to some of the airline’s other recent leaders. Luxon’s predecessor, Fyfe, dealt with the crash of an Airbus 320 off the coast of France that killed seven people; and his successor, Greg Foran, faced the Covid-19 pandemic, the most disruptive event in the industry since World War II.

Ask Luxon about his record at Air New Zealand and he emphasises measures that the airline took to position itself as socially responsible: promoting more women into senior leadership; introducing 26 weeks of paid leave for new parents and three weeks for victims of family violence; changing its policy on tattoos so that staff could have tā moko after the airline was accused of discriminating against job applicants.

But Luxon was also unrelenting about improving Air New Zealand’s commercial performance, according to close observers of the airline in those years.

“There was a consistent and integrated strategic approach,” says Andy Bowley, head of research at investment advisers Forsyth Barr.

“The messaging was very simple from year to year. They were sticking to their knitting and doing the same things well.”

“He knows one way, and that’s foot-on-the-throat growth,” said the Herald’s airline correspondent Grant Bradley when Luxon stood down in 2019.

One union leader told Bradley at the time: “Christopher Luxon is a charismatic, energetic leader who genuinely cares for his employees and their families. However, as unions, we did feel that this often came second to the focus on return on investor capital.”

Politics was ‘always on the bucket list’

Luxon had always been curious about politics and believed that someday he might seek public office.

“It was always on the bucket list,” Amanda says.

Those ambitions began to crystallise at Air New Zealand, as Luxon got a close-up view of the government and economy in operation. Luxon says he was frustrated at seeing the country not fulfilling his potential and believed he could do better.

His interest in politics was evident early on to people in the company’s upper ranks, according to former colleagues.

“Chris and I talked an awful lot about politics,” recalls Air New Zealand’s former chief revenue officer, Cam Wallace.

“I was always aware that he was tremendously well-read on politics [and] had a deep understanding about the political landscape, not just in New Zealand.”

Luxon sought out people who could help him understand the political system and formed friendships with several senior figures in Key’s National-led government.

One was Paula Bennett, the former deputy prime minister. Bennett says she got to know Luxon when she was tourism minister, and Luxon became someone she would go to for discreet advice about dealing with personal and professional problems. For her part, she helped Luxon understand how Wellington operated.

“He never blatantly told me that he was [considering entering politics himself], and I never asked,” Bennett says. But it was evident to her from early in their friendship that he was leaning in that direction.

He also became close to Key, who recalls Luxon calling him late at night to talk about the big political stories of the day. Other businesspeople had courted Key’s advice about moving into politics over the years, Key says, but not many had impressed him as truly serious about it.

“In Chris’s case, I was absolutely convinced from one of the very first times that I met him that he not only would be a politician but that he would be prime minister.”

Key says Luxon’s political views struck him as “classic National Party”: smaller government; lower tax; helping people when they really need it but not in a way that makes them dependent. “He’s definitely not a hard rightwinger,” Key says. “He’s not Ruth Richardson.”

Why did Key believe Luxon wanted to move into politics?

“Those who don’t like you – and they used to say the same thing about me – would say, ‘Wants to be prime minister because he wants it on the CV,’ ‘Wants to tick the box.’ I don’t believe that many people go into politics just solely for the ego. And I know for a fact that in Chris’s case that is not a motivating factor.”

“Is he doing it for his own benefit or because he believes he can make a difference? In all the discussions I’ve had with him, I can sincerely tell you that I believe he’s doing it for the right reason. Which is, at the heart of it: he has a very strong moral compass. He believes in a fair and decent society.”

Luxon resigned from Air New Zealand in June 2019; became National’s candidate for Botany in November 2019 (the seat had previously been held by Jami-Lee Ross); and was elected to Parliament in October 2020.

He walked into a political disaster.

National, led by Judith Collins, suffered its worst election defeat in nearly two decades, losing 23 of its 56 seats. Collins stayed on, but the party was in turmoil. In November 2021, Collins was removed by the caucus and Luxon was chosen to replace her.

He was the party’s fifth leader since 2016. He had been in Parliament barely a year.

Key: ‘He’s not Ted Cruz in waiting’

One controversy that emerged during Luxon’s first election campaign in 2020 was his connection to Upper Room, a church in Newmarket, Auckland.

Founded in 2009, Upper Room is a “missional community” that helps people better their lives through evangelism, service and peacemaking, according to an archived version of its website. Its leaders have preached a message of love and compassion while also promoting strongly conservative positions on issues such as assisted suicide and gay marriage.

Luxon’s involvement in Upper Room became a focal point in the campaign after media commentators discovered sermons and posts by one of the church’s pastors that appeared supportive of Donald Trump and conspiracy theories.

Luxon distanced himself from the pastor’s remarks and said he had stopped going to the church years earlier, but his religious views continued to be a subject of interest after he became an MP.

In his maiden address to the House, Luxon said it had become “acceptable to stereotype those who have a Christian faith in public as being extreme”. For him, Christianity was an anchor that gave him purpose and shaped his values, but it was “not in itself a political agenda”.

“People think he’s part of a new-age religious order, a kind of happy-clappy church, for want of a better term, and that somehow he’s deeply conservative and that would play out in his thinking as prime minister,” Key tells the Herald. “And the answer is that’s not true.”

“You could work with him for five years and not know that he was religious,” says Wallace.

Nevertheless, Luxon has struggled to convince some audiences that he doesn’t have a conservative social agenda motivated by evangelical Christian beliefs, especially on abortion.

In November 2021, he told Newshub he was “pro-life”. Pressed on whether he believed abortion was “tantamount to murder”, Luxon, still inexperienced at handling pointed questions from journalists, seemed to agree with the premise: “That’s what a pro-life position is,” he said.

Luxon’s views became a flashpoint again last year when a ruling by the US Supreme Court ignited a heated debate about abortion rights. Luxon has since tried to neutralise abortion as a campaign issue, saying he would resign rather than allow a government under his control to restrict access.

Key says this is genuine: “He’ll have zero interest in rewriting abortion law or anything like that. He’s not some kind of Ted Cruz in waiting. He isn’t going into politics and hoping to become prime minister to do a rearguard reverse-play on the current liberal rights of certain New Zealanders. That’s just of no interest to him.

“Frankly I’d be amazed if he ever touched any of that.”

However, political analysts say Luxon’s faltering handling of the issue has left doubts in the minds of some audiences and still comes up in focus groups of potential voters.

“I think it did hurt him,” says one political adviser. “And it hurt him with that crucial segment, the liberal woman who voted [for Helen] Clark and then voted Key … It does label him as someone who is out of tune with modern women.”

In interviews with the Herald, Luxon and his wife seemed more hesitant to talk about religion than any other topic.

Amanda says she is reluctant to talk about it because it is deeply personal and their beliefs have been misrepresented. She says the couple’s religious faith is important to them but is not their main motivation for wanting to contribute to public life.

They have a genuine commitment to social justice, she says, that stems from a recognition they have been “really lucky in life” and should use their advantages to “improve the lives of other people with it”.

It’s an ethos the couple have strived to exemplify in their private lives and to pass on to their children, Amanda says.

When Olivia was 13, Amanda took her to Manila, the capital of the Philippines, to see people living in extreme squalor so that she “understood what life was like for other people, and what her responsibility around that was”.

After they returned from Manila, Olivia became a youth ambassador for Tearfund, a Christian charity that works on issues including modern slavery. Luxon has served as a trustee of Tearfund’s New Zealand arm – registered as the Evangelical Alliance Relief Fund – but stood down after he became a parliamentary candidate.

(One friend suggested the Luxons have donated a substantial amount of their income to charity over the years. Luxon refused to discuss their financial affairs, except to say he believes that “if you’ve got resources, you write a big cheque until it hurts, and you help people”.)

In Amanda’s telling, Luxon’s ambition to be prime minister comes from a desire to “leverage” his success to help other New Zealanders “live their best life”.

She describes his thought process: “‘I’ve got this really unique set of skills and abilities which I’ve spent years developing and crafting. I understand the world. I understand problems. I’m really good at problem-solving, sorting things out. I’m really good at leadership. I’m really good at all of these things. So, the best thing for me to do with that is use them to help solve problems for other people.’”

‘Boy, was he hard-nosed’

On a Wednesday night in West Auckland, Luxon holds a campaign meeting at a sports venue attended by about 150 people.

A day earlier, in an interview at his home in Remuera, the Herald asked Luxon what he would do first if he got into power and he said he would be utterly focused on reforming the economy to reduce the cost of living: “That’s the single biggest issue that is impacting New Zealanders.

“That is my job No 1 – a bit like in many of the corporate jobs – to sort the commercials out quickly so that you’ve got the platform and the base to then go off and do other things. It’s the same thing here: Sort the economy out, get it fixed. Get it moving in the right direction so that we can then invest and grow and improve and deliver better public services like health and education.”

It is a message that even Luxon’s critics say should be persuasive at a time when concerns about the economy are foremost in many voters’ minds – and one that Luxon, as a former chief executive of a trusted company, should be well-placed to deliver regardless of the doubts about him otherwise. “It’s his only card,” says a Labour adviser, “but it’s a pretty powerful one.”

Now, addressing the audience in West Auckland, Luxon hammers his core message: Kickstart the economy. End wasteful spending. Liberate our government from the career politicians and overpaid management consultants in Wellington. Get the country back on track.

Listening at the back of the room, Sunil Kaushal, a financial adviser, says he admires Hipkins but intends to vote for National in October because he thinks Luxon would be sounder on economic matters.

Kaushal, a former chair of the India New Zealand Business Council, says he was once on the losing side of negotiations with Luxon, when Luxon was at Air New Zealand, and thought he was a “very hard negotiator”.

“Boy, was he hard-nosed. I think he’s probably the leader that we need at the moment. We just need someone to take us through this trough.”

When Luxon finishes speaking, people cluster around him hoping to speak one-on-one: migrants needing help with visas, National supporters wanting selfies and a woman keen to know his policy on cryptocurrencies. Kaushal approaches and Luxon recognises him: “Hey, brother, how are ya?” he says and slaps Kaushal on the shoulder.

The next day, Luxon does it all again in Taupō. Then Oamaru. Blenheim. Nelson. Warkworth. Manurewa. “I’m just gonna give it everything I can and know that I will have done my best,” he says. “There is no plan B.”

Alex Spence is a senior investigative journalist based in Auckland. Before joining the Herald, he spent 17 years in London where he worked for The Times, Politico and BuzzFeed News.