Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has apologised for telling a Rotorua business audience that New Zealand firms had a “parent-child mentality” and looked too often to the government for help, saying on Monday afternoon that he “got that wrong”.
The apology came at the start of Luxon’s post-Cabinet media conference, hours after he had declined to make one during his weekly interview on RNZ’s Morning Report. It closed off four days of criticism that began at a business chamber breakfast in Rotorua last Friday morning.
At that event, Rotorua Business Chamber chief executive Melanie Short was moderating and put the pressure her members were under directly to the Prime Minister. Businesses were absorbing extra costs, she said, and could not pass them on.
“We do not want to pass them on because we’re also getting less customers through the door,” Short said, according to a transcript released by the Prime Minister’s office to RNZ. “So, it’s a matter of time, how long can we hang on?”
Luxon’s answer ran to several minutes. He opened by calling the framing of the question negative, then contrasted his six years running an airline business in Chicago with what he found on returning home.
“The last person I wanted to ever talk to as a CEO was the government,” he told the room. “I didn’t sit there in Chicago saying I wonder what the government thinks and I wonder what they’re doing to help me for my business?”
He then said he had come home to New Zealand and found “a parent-child mentality”. Luxon said he had sat in boardrooms around the country where the conversation turned to what the government was going to do or think.
“Who cares what the government thinks or does? Our job is to be adult, adult, adult,” he said, before adding that business, political and community leaders each had a different but complementary part to play.
The remarks landed badly over the weekend. Labour finance and economy spokesperson Barbara Edmonds said in a statement issued on Saturday that businesses were not asking for a lecture.
“Businesses aren’t asking for a patronising lecture and a handout from the Prime Minister, they’re asking for an economy that works,” Edmonds said. “Rotorua businesses told Christopher Luxon confidence is freefalling, customers are disappearing, and costs keep rising. They are telling him his Government’s choices aren’t working. His response was to call them negative and tell them to grow up.”
Edmonds pointed to business liquidations at a 15-year high and 40,000 more people out of work under the current government.
ACT leader and Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour was gentler. He told RNZ that Luxon may have “got two groups of people mixed up here”.
“It’s important to differentiate that there are some people who call themselves businesspeople and yet always have their hand out to the government, and there are a whole lot of people not like that doing it bloody tough, for reasons not of their fault,” Seymour said.
On Monday morning Luxon was still defending the substance of the remarks. He told Morning Report that his point had been about partnership rather than blame, and that he saw the two sides as equals.
“I believe very strongly that government, business, community leaders actually are equal in our society,” he said. “They do different things, but they need to work together on the challenges and the obstacles, and also the opportunities that we have.”
By 4pm his position had shifted. After opening remarks on the Northland Expressway and business confidence, Luxon told reporters he wanted to take the opportunity to apologise for what he had said at the Rotorua breakfast.
“I know many small business owners are doing it tough right now,” he said. “They’re working long hours. They’re managing financial pressures, looking after their staff, and doing everything they can to grow their businesses.”
Small businesses were “the backbone of our economy”, Luxon said, and he had enormous respect for people “backing themselves, taking a risk, and building a business”.
“So I am sorry if my comments did not properly acknowledge the challenges that many small business owners are facing, and that I got that wrong,” he said. “I didn’t want to cause any offence. That’s not what I intended to do.”
Asked what had changed his mind between the morning interview and the afternoon conference, Luxon said he had gone back and read the transcript and decided he could have expressed himself better. He said he had received “a couple of comments” from caucus colleagues, but that the bulk of the feedback had come through the media and social media, which he had read himself.
Finance Minister Nicola Willis, alongside him, said she believed the Prime Minister was “absolutely” in touch with the experience of business people. She said she had not had feedback from business leaders directly.
The row sits awkwardly against the economic numbers the government has been pointing to. Luxon told the conference the economy was forecast to grow on average 2.7 percent a year for the next four years, and that the job of government was to keep backing confidence with a long-term plan.
Confidence surveys have improved. Business confidence jumped 19 points in July, though economists were at the same time picking the economy to shrink. The harder measures have been less kind. Unemployment is tipped to reach a decade high just as interest rates start climbing again, and firms that have spent two years cutting costs are the ones most likely to hear a comment about adults and children as a comment about them.
That gap between the survey mood and the shop floor is what made a throwaway line at a breakfast into a four-day political problem. With the general election set for 7 November, the small business vote is one both major parties have spent the year courting, and Rotorua is exactly the sort of provincial centre where the argument about who is responsible for a slow economy will be settled.
If you want to see where the parties stand on tax, employment law and support for small business ahead of the vote, our voting tool lets you compare their positions side by side.
Did the Prime Minister have a point about how New Zealand businesses talk about government, or was the apology overdue? Leave a comment below and tell us what you think.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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