Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Luxon's corporate speak is not a big deal

Heather du Plessis-Allan Drive

The latest thing that isn't a big deal but will have a big deal made of it - because it's the Prime Minister - is that Chris Luxon has called us voters 'customers'.

He did it in a sit down interview where he was asked about being seen as out of touch, and he was saying he was because he talks to people all the time. He said -“It’s been a belief system of mine, talk to the customer, to the public, to the people and the voters."

At which point the interviewer basically told him to ditch the corporate speak.

I don’t have a problem with this, do you? This is not a big deal.

When I was at university studying postgrad politics, we often referred to voters as stakeholders. As in stakeholders in the Government of the day. That's a corporate term, that's not unusual.

It's also not unusual to see voters in a transactional relationship with a political party. If anything, it's actually not a bad thing for politicians to see us as customers - customers who will only come back for more from a political party if we get what we want.

Policies that we like, promises that are delivered and not broken, and so on.

What's the problem for a voter in that? You vote for a party, you get what you want. That is arguably the opposite of what the last Labour Government was doing pretty much the entire time on, for example, crime.

We kept saying, as customers - we don’t like what we’re getting, can you go harder on the gangs?

And they kept responding with - you’re imagining it, you're wrong, we're going hard on the gangs.

They might have had a better showing at the last election if they remembered the mantra- the customer’s always right. And many ‘customers’ didn’t come back for more.

Also, Luxon needs to stop apologising for the corporate speak.

Bringing a corporate approach is part of some of the best stuff that he’s done - and doing. His quarterly targets for the Government, managing the various parts of the coalition, trying to get efficiencies out of the public service...he's a manager, he just needs to lean into it.

Yes, sometimes you want less transaction and more principle in politics, but ultimately - Luxon's onto something.

He's a guy selling us a product and his product is the National Party. We are the customers and we want what we want out of the National Party. Being seen as customers is not a bad thing.

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