CHRISTOPHER LUXON'S 'CEO APPROACH': SHORING UP THE ECONOMIC STATUS QUO

Supporters of the National-coalition government have praised its economic philosophy. The editor of ZB Plus, Philip Crump, has admiringly described it as 'the CEO approach'. But as Green Party co-leader Chloe Swarbrick has observed, New Zealand is not a company, and its Prime Minister is not a CEO.


CHRISTOPHER LUXON'S bright idea is that he is not, in fact, Prime Minister of New Zealand, but its CEO. It's what ZB Plus editor Philip Crump has admiringly described as 'the CEO approach'. This means that everything must be subordinated to the goal of driving up profit and accumulation. The winners and losers of such an orientation are grimly inevitable. While those at the top of the capitalist tree will amass ever more wealth, those at the bottom will face further and increasing economic hardship. The playing field has tilted ever further in the direction of the wealthy and its aggrandisement. Its welfare for the rich and capitalism for the rest of us; it's a $3 billion cash payout for landlords and cuts to benefit levels and a harsher sanctions regime for beneficiaries.

Of course, Luxon does not phrase it in such nakedly venal terms. According to him, it's all about 'rebuilding the economy'. But his job is to shore up the economic status quo while his coalition government imposes its austerity agenda on the working class.

Labour cannot possibly credibly protest the Government's economic agenda until it finally abandons neoliberalism and presents the country with a clear and progressive economic alternative. But this is a task beyond a Labour Party that has been hollowed out by four decades of slavish loyalty to neoliberalism. And no one can seriously claim that the determinedly centrist Chris Hipkins will ever countenance any plan to storm the battlements of capitalism.

The reality is that the Labour Party long ago lost any semblance of a working class soul. Its role now is to defend the neoliberal order and the economic elite that prosper by it. The 'liberalism' of Labour, as it amply demonstrated in government under Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, has become a politics in which the government cravenly submits to corporate power and cultural issues and debates distract from fundamental economic needs.

Labour will continue to remind the electorate what a disaster the Labour Government of 2017-23 was for working people. Under Ardern, who promised change but delivered more of the same, inequality, and poverty continued to expand. And, as business commentator Bernard Hickey observed: '...the Government’s Covid policies made the rich almost $1t richer, while the poor were allowed to get $400m further in debt to the Government itself and were forced to apply for more than twice as many food parcels in our largest city.'

And, throughout those six years, Labour could rely on the loyal support of the Green Party. But the chief architect of the Green Party's subservience to Labour, James Shaw, has since resigned to be replaced by Chloe Swarbrick.

Almost by default, she has become the unofficial leader of the parliamentary opposition. In a recent NZ Herald column, she has attacked Luxon's vision of a corporate New Zealand:

'It is difficult to stand up to those profiting handsomely from the status quo, wedded to the game with the rules designed in their favour. These gatekeepers will do anything to ensure you don’t realise these things can change if enough regular people decide to feel just as entitled to the political system working for them as they do for those presently sitting at the top.

“The economy” is not a game of Monopoly. It’s all of us, the planet we live on and the rules we put in place to govern those relationships. These rules have changed time and again as society has evolved.

In 2024, 40 years on from the 1984 Rogernomics reforms, it’s time for an economy that serves both people and the planet - not the other way around.'

The onus is on the Green Party to provide a progressive economic alternative that isn't beholden to the interests of 'the market'.

ANOTHER POLITICAL leader, who thought he could run the country as a business, was former US president Donald Trump. 

Soon after he was elected he selected son-in-law and property investor Jared Kushner to head a team that would sort out what Trump described as 'government stagnation'. He told the Washington Post: 'I promised the American people I would produce results, and apply my 'ahead of schedule, under budget mentality' to the government.

Sounding eerily like Chris Luxon, Kushner said in an interview that 'We should have excellence in government. The government should be run like a great American company. Our hope is that we can achieve successes and efficiencies for our customers, who are the citizens'.

Under President Trump's plan to run the United States as a corporate business, the country's 200 or so richest people increased their combined wealth by a staggering $1 trillion. In 2019 the Guardian reported that Trumps's 1.5 trillion cuts helped billionaires to pay a lower rate than the working class.