Chris Penk has lost every one of his ministerial portfolios and says he will leave Parliament at the election, hours after a leadership challenge that Prime Minister Christopher Luxon survived in a National Party caucus vote on Wednesday.
The vote followed an urgently called caucus meeting at Parliament that ran for more than three hours behind closed doors. Luxon read a short statement to reporters afterwards. “There was a confidence vote in my leadership this morning at our caucus meeting, and I have the full support of our caucus,” he said. “And our caucus is united, and it is determined to win this election.” No numbers from the vote were released.
Luxon then removed Penk from the ministry. “Chris Penk launched a leadership challenge this week, which resulted in today’s confidence vote,” the Prime Minister said. “This makes his role untenable, and as such I have removed his portfolios.”
The practical effect of that decision is a significant reshuffle of serious jobs less than three months out from polling day. Paul Goldsmith picks up Defence, Veterans, Space, the Government Communications Security Bureau and the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service. Simon Watts becomes Minister for Building and Construction.
Goldsmith was already one of the busiest ministers in the Government. His Beehive listing has him as Minister of Justice, Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage, Minister for Media and Communications, Minister for Public Service and Digitising Government, Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations and Minister for Pacific Peoples. Adding the five portfolios handed over by Penk takes him to eleven. Two of those five, the GCSB and the NZSIS, are the country’s intelligence agencies, and the responsible minister answers for them to Parliament and sets their policy direction. Goldsmith will now carry that alongside justice and the Treaty settlements programme through an election campaign.
Watts is also stacking portfolios. He is already Minister of Revenue, Minister of Climate Change, Minister of Local Government and Minister for Auckland. Building and Construction makes five, and it lands on his desk while councils are working through the Government’s housing and consenting changes.
Penk announced his own future on Wednesday evening. “I have reflected on my political future with my family tonight, and have decided I will not seek re-election as an MP in November,” he said. He added that “it has been a privilege to serve my community of Kaipara ki Mahurangi for the last nine years” and that “I have decided it is the time for me to seek other opportunities to serve New Zealand”.
Penk entered Parliament in 2017 as the MP for Helensville and has held Kaipara ki Mahurangi since 2020. He had been Minister for Building and Construction since the Government took office, and only picked up Defence, the intelligence agencies and space in a reshuffle in April, which means he held the defence job for barely four months. He goes to the back bench for the remainder of the term and will not stand again.
Other National MPs were quick to close ranks in front of the cameras. Leader of the House Chris Bishop, whose name had circulated in the leadership speculation, said he had not been counting votes. “He was not doing the numbers for me,” Bishop said of Penk. “Chris Penk, as the Prime Minister said, launched a challenge.” List MP Melissa Lee told reporters “I think the whole caucus is 100% behind Christopher Luxon”.
This is the second time this year Luxon has faced down his own caucus. He forced a confidence vote on himself in April after weeks of speculation about his position, and won that one too. What has not shifted in the months since is the polling that drove the unease in the first place.
The most recent Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll, published on 7 August, had National on 31.0 percent and Labour on 27.8 percent, with the Greens on 10.1 percent, New Zealand First on 9.1 percent and ACT on 7.3 percent. The Opportunities Party was on 6.1 percent, up 2.8 points, which on those numbers would put it into Parliament and scramble the arithmetic for both major blocs. Luxon led the preferred prime minister question on 23.2 percent, ahead of Chris Hipkins on 19.8 percent.
Hipkins used the caucus meeting to make the obvious point about a governing party spending a sitting week on itself. “Backstabbing and infighting just means more delay and more distraction for New Zealand,” the Labour leader said. ACT leader David Seymour, whose party governs alongside National, was not much kinder. “We need to cut the waste in Wellington and grow the country, not point the fingers at each other as politicians,” he told the New Zealand Herald.
Luxon framed the next three months as a straight choice. “It’s also an opportunity to frame the choice for voters, which is crystal clear on November the seventh,” he said. “An opposition that wants to take New Zealand backwards, or a national government that wants to fix the basics and build the future and the plan that takes New Zealand forward.”
The general election is on Saturday 7 November, with advance voting opening on 26 October. That leaves ministers roughly eleven weeks to run their portfolios before the campaign properly takes over, and two of them are now running a great many more than they were on Tuesday. If you are still working out where the parties stand on the issues that matter to you, our voting tool lets you compare their positions side by side.
What do you make of one minister holding eleven portfolios going into an election? Have your say in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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