Christopher Luxon, PM – but for how long?

And The Great Big Free Speech Debate grinds on

Is it over for prime minister Christopher Luxon?

While hardly anyone one in Auckland was fussed, Wellington was in a frenzy, we were told last week, about moves to roll Luxon, with his media-anointed successor being supposedly Chris Bishop. Opinion polls rate the Luxon government, the National Party and Mr Luxon himself at embarrassingly low levels, especially as it’s their first term. And National’s two partners, NZ First and ACT, have been locking horns with one another over ACT’s pride and joy, the Regulatory Standards Act, making the whole coalition look shaky – or shakier than usual.

If National lose the next election, as polls suggest they could, that’ll be a historic humiliation: the first-ever one-term-only National government. Furthermore, Luxon could lose to the same guy (Hipkins) whom he defeated in the last election.

Mr Luxon was, of course, upbeat when talking with broadcaster Mike Hosking. The two chums brushed off the rumours in a jokey manner. Luxon expressed confidence that he’d be leading National into the 2026 election.

Chris Bishop himself doused the remaining bush-fires, assuring reporters that he was “definitely not” planning to roll Luxon as leader, and telling them they’d been “interviewing their typewriters”. Reporters need to do their jobs and dig up some facts, not manufacture rumours.

The historical record suggests a leadership spill is a bad idea for National.

The Beehive coup in 1997 that rolled Jim Bolger, replacing him with Jenny Shipley, precipitated the breakdown of the coalition relationship with Winston Peters. National was lucky to avoid a snap election in 1998, as they hastily reupholstered the government. They were defeated anyway by Helen Clark in 1999.

If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well
It were done quickly.

Shakespeare’s Macbeth

It would need to be done in December or January, if it were done at all.

Let’s not overlook the possibility that Luxon could voluntarily stand aside, though. Knowing that their leadership capital was past its peak, prime ministers John Key and Jacinda Ardern both quit mid-term, ensuring a bloodless transition to Bill English and Chris Hipkins respectively. Luxon’s leadership capital never reached anything even resembling a “peak”, so now is as good a time as any, in theory.

Here’s the catch, though. Suppose that Kiwis learn on the 6pm news that Luxon’s going, voluntarily or not, and that he’ll probably be replaced by (let’s say) Chris Bishop. What difference will it make? The consequences of the Key and Ardern resignations, and the Bolger sacking, suggest that it neither boosts a party’s polling (or, if it does, not for long) nor helps them win the next election.

In the 2017 election, after Key’s departure, National did win more seats than Labour. (They won the game but lost the scrap afterwards.) But National was then in a much stronger position to switch leaders than at present, as they’re currently polling in the low 30s. And none of National’s alternative party leaders has the kind of following or charisma that Ardern had in 2017 when Andrew Little stood aside for her.

Breaking the deal between Luxon and Peters would only hand the latter sufficient cause for grievance to parlay his way into another coalition with Labour after the next election. After all, he doesn’t take kindly to being betrayed like that. And he could claim he’s saving the country from having a dysfunctional TPM involved in the serious job of government.

From the National Party’s point of view, then, getting rid of Luxon sounds like a really bad move, given recent political experience, and despite the polls. Most people may have stopped listening to him, having quickly tired of the management-speak, but what they’re really concerned about is the cost of living. Changing leaders won’t “grow the economy”, let alone create jobs or boost wages and salaries.

Maybe National and their two coalition partners – and indeed the whole country – will just have to put up with Luxon for time being.

Let the voters give their verdict at the appointed time.

But would a change of government make them any better off? I’ll be watching – from a safe distance – the Labour Party conference…

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Are you getting tired of The Free Speech Debate – and of the pompous commentators who dominate it? And have you noticed how this debate in New Zealand often ends up in a parish-pump argument over the Treaty of Waitangi? Or, just to prove Godwin right, someone brings Hitler into it!

So let me apply some simple scholarship to this tiresome debate between flaming straw people. In doing so, I try to avoid words like Western, Enlightenment, Imperialism and Indigenous – words that overshadow more than they enlighten.

Here, then, are some propositions:

Only in a social environment where people are free to speak their minds could there be such a vibrant (even if sometimes pretentious) debate about Free Speech.

People are at their most “free” in any debate when they’re not driven by emotions such as hatred or irritation, but when they’re nonetheless willing to empathise with others’ points of view and to respect their intelligence.

Some people’s utterances, however, do get much larger audiences and are treated with much greater authority than others’. Often, though not always, that’s because they actually merit more attention. Sometimes, admittedly, it’s just because they’re louder and more obnoxious than others. So the rhetorical effect of freedom of speech, in practice, isn’t evenly or democratically distributed, and it appears never to have been so in any society that I’ve learned about. (Anthropologists and Habermas groupies can nit-pick about that as much as they like.)

Today, speech has never been freer. People see and hear unfamiliar things that they hate to see and hear, and that’s taking some getting used to. Social media lifted the lid off humanity’s baser drives and cruder thoughts.

And yet, we should always be vigilant about threats to free speech, as the dictatorships of the 20th C have taught us. The ability of AI to enable surveillance of everything you say and do is a real worry.

And yet, we’ve never had it so good. Sitting on my couch, I can read, in critically edited translations, the thoughts of minds from many different ages and civilisations. I doubt that humanity has ever witnessed such a dramatic and rapid translation movement, plus conversion into readily accessible electronic formats.

Compare that with the fact that Aristotle’s Politics (which sits on my shelf in English translation) was not available in Arabic to Al-Farabi in the 10th C. Furthermore, it wasn’t translated into Latin until the 13th C, at which time it made a huge impact on Thomas Aquinas (later Saint Thomas), and hence influenced Catholic theology.

That sounds obscure perhaps, but let me contrast those very slow rates of translation with what’s available at anyone’s disposal in English today. Here’s one current favourite of mine:

The Baburnama is the memoir of Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur (1483–1530), written originally in Chagatay Turkish. Babur came from what is today Uzbekistan and he’s often remembered as the “founder” of the Mughal Dynasty, though I’d argue that happened more by accident than design.

It’s only recently, in historical terms, that a person could read him in English, in the comfort of home, at an affordable price. But that translation didn’t happen without someone (in this case, Wheeler M. Thackston) having the “freedom” as well as the languages to do it.

One side-argument in the Free Speech Debate is about whether there’s a faculty of reason shared by all humans that makes it possible for us to communicate, to share ideas and also to differ – or, whether differing eras and cultures are so different that we cannot enter into them without misunderstanding or even harming them, as “Reason” in itself is a culture-specific concept imposed by colonisation.

Is there, or is there not, a Universal Reason out there that can save us from those troublesome postmodern academics? Philosophers can argue freely over that forever.

Well, funnily enough, I cannot enter into Babur’s Turco-Mongol world. And yet, thanks to his memoirs and to the diligent work of many scholars and translators, I can try to understand his experiences. At one point in his memoir, for instance, he reveals his love of mangoes, and suddenly I found we had a taste in common. The many beheadings were hard for me to relate to, but I was in no position to argue with him. After all, he’s dead.

Had it not been for academic freedom, and the freedoms of thought and expression, however, Babur’s memories and observations may not have become available to me today. He too would have regretted that, as his legacy meant a lot to him. And yet, there are plenty of people today who’d happily see the memory of him wiped out. His name is highly controversial among India’s Hindu nationalists.

The Free Speech Debate will no doubt grind on tediously, and I have contributed a bit to it, I confess. But it’s much better to take advantage of the freedom we have and to enjoy the vast archive of human thought that’s been set out for us than to waste more time on that debate.

Now I’m going to break my promise not to use the E-word and recommend that you read S. Frederick Starr’s Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age From the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane. Blow your mind! Read it – or listen to it on Audiobooks.

True freedom of thought and expression – if it’s not to descend into insults and violence – requires a literate reading public. This is where things get worrying.

Reading has to compete with online video and gaming. The supply of readable text may have exploded, but the demand for it is dropping. Consequently the value of the next readable text produced by anyone, including me, declines virtually to zero.

Surveys in the US show a decline in numbers of adults who reported in 2022 having read at least one book in the past year (down from 55% to below 50% over the course of a decade), and a long-term decline in the proportion of 13-year-olds who reported reading for fun almost every day. Children’s reading skills are declining as well as their spending less time reading.

The Horizon Research survey done for Read NZ Te Pou Muramura reported in 2025 that 87% of adult New Zealanders read or started to read at least one book in the past 12 months – a result that was more or less steady since 2017. That’s a much higher figure than obtained in the US, but the US survey omits reading required for work or school, and the NZ survey question includes “or started to read”, which could include picking up and casting aside in boredom.

And I find it hard to believe the report that, among NZ adults, “32% have read a poetry book all or part way through in the past 12 months.” Cue the Tui billboard.

“When I want to read a novel, I write one.” ― Benjamin Disraeli

New Zealand’s 2022 results in the Programme for International Student Assessment on the knowledge and skills of 15-year-old students (PISA) reported no significant change in reading over the 2012-2022 period, but results remained below those observed between 2000 and 2009. The decline in PISA results was “particularly steep” in mathematics, however.

Here’s the political point, though: a free democratic society is a literate society. The growth of democracy, if measured practically by the adoption of a universal franchise, was made possible by a dramatic rise in literacy, coupled with a free press, and hence by news and opinion that people could read – and could afford to read.

We now see (on the supply side) an unprecedented explosion in the quantity of accessible news and opinion, but (on the demand side) no growth in literacy or participation in public life. Indeed, literacy may be declining, even in affluent societies, and participation in elections across the planet is known to be declining. Many more words, but fewer active critical readers. Writing, under such circumstances, becomes virtually worthless in economic and political terms. Readers expect words to be supplied on demand, and not to pay for them.

Words have never been freer, nor worth less, than they are today.

Thank you for reading Politics Happens.