At a press conference on Saturday, the Prime Minister pointedly ducked a question about how many MPs voted in support of him during the Caucus vote of confidence in April.
The question speculated that he had the support of only 28.
Asked if that was the case, he said: “I just know I have the support of my Caucus. And with that, guys, I just say to you, I have the support of the Caucus. I’m very confident.”
The question did not come out of the blue.
There have been claims about the vote circulating within the wider National Party ecosphere over the past week.
The questioner (Jamie Ensor from the Herald) suggested it was 27 for and 22 against.
The version presented to POLITIK last week had the vote at 28-21.
But the fine print doesn’t matter.
The claim that National’s Caucus is split more or less down the middle on support for its leader is out and about.
Though those leaking the numbers have credibility, whether what they have are the actual numbers is another matter.
National’s tellers for the vote were the party president Sylvia Wood and Chief Whip, Stuart Smith. They are the only people who absolutely know the real numbers.
The ballot papers are destroyed after the vote.
However, a score sheet can be kept, and it would seem that is what may be doing the rounds.
The question, of course, is why it would suddenly start appearing now.
And the answer to that is that there is talk once again within the National ecosphere of whether Christopher Luxon should be replaced as leader.
If the claims about the vote in March are true, then it would require only four or five MPs who supported him then to switch sides, and he would have technically lost the support of Caucus.
But that points up National’s problem.
Like Bill Rowling in the 1970s, Luxon does not have an overwhelming command of his Caucus.
However, unlike Bill Rowling, who faced David Lange, Luxon has one strong card, he has no clear challenger.
Those who would unseat him had hoped that the Taxpayers Union Curia poll might be worse than it turned out to be and that there might be more backbench blood on the floor after the ranking of the party list on Saturday.
That way, Caucus might have turned its mind with more focus to who might be a successor.
But that doesn’t appear to have happened.
The most notable thing about the poll was that it confirmed the rise of the Opportunity Party and put the centre right eight per cent ahead of the centre left.
Even adding Opportunity to the centre left still didn’t do enough to lift Labour onto the Treasury benches.
Anyone seeking to change the leadership needed the reverse to be the case.
And Saturday’s publication of the party list revealed only a small pocket of potential disgruntlement.
Former Cabinet Minister Melissa Lee plummeted from 13 to 30, which on paper would suggest her political career was over.
Luxon told journalists he hadn’t talked to her about her demotion
“She could win Mount Albert,” he said, talking about a seat where Lee lost out to Labour MP Helen White in 2023 by only 18 votes.
This year it is also the seat where Opportunity Leader Qiulae Wong is running.
“You think about Mount Albert, who have we got running there? And how would that look?” said Luxon.
“You’ve got the Green candidate, you’ve got a TOP candidate, you’ve got a Labour candidate, and you’ve got Melissa Lee, who’s well understood and well known in that electorate from 2008. And so, we are backing Melissa Lee to win that seat.”
Luxon has a point.
Opportunity (formerly known as TOP) is cannibalising the Labour vote.
But does National really want any more electorate seats? Every extra electorate seat they get is potentitally a list seat they loose. It is conceivable they could end up with no list seats and therefore no Nicola Willis, no Paul Goldsmith and no Gerry Brownlee, all of whom are dependent on the list.
Chris Bishop is in a more ambiguous situation. He may win Wellington South but he also might not in which case he would need the list to get back to Parliament.
The other big falls on National’s list can all be more confident they will get back in their electorates and will have landed below where they were in 2023 on the list with no more damage than bruised egos.
The big fallers are Suze Redmayne (down 11 places); Catherine Wedd (down 14); Barbara Kuriger (down 7).
At the same time, there have been some big jumps.
Tama Potaka is up 13 to 11 and Nancy Lu up four to 16.
Lu’s rise places her inside the top 20, which is usually reserved for Cabinet members.
Luxon described her as an “incredibly hardworking MP”.
“She’s got a great connection to the Chinese Kiwi community here in New Zealand, and of course, that’s a big driver of our party vote as well,” he said.
The need to shore up that vote may have become more urgent after Winston Peters’ recent attacks on Green MP Xu Nan and Luxon’s refusal to sack him as a consequence.
Also notable is the promotion to the high 20s and low 30s of a small group of 2023 backbench MPs who are now within sniffing distance of Cabinet.
They are Katie Nimon, Tom Rutherford, Carl Bates, Dana Kirkpatrick, Carlos Cheung, Grant McCallum and Ryan Hamilton.
So the list is hardly a recipe for a caucus rebellion.
That doesn’t mean that Luxon has seen every threat off.
There is concern about the apparent callousness of his comments about small business in Rotorua on the weekend before last and his sudden announcement on Friday of a plan to have another referendum on MMP.
“I have some good weeks and some challenging weeks,” he conceded on Saturday.
“The key thing for me was that I could have done better with respect to my comments in Rotorua.”
So he has more or less acknowledged that the Rotorua comments didn’t go well, but when he was asked on Saturday about the MMP comments, he waffled.
“I don’t think we had an explicit policy about it,” he said.
“It was one of the things that we formed a judgment of during the campaign that we do support actually going at some point into a referendum on a four-year term.
“We actually had it in our coalition agreements, if you remember, this last term, but we decided our priority was our economic priority, as we will continue to prioritise.
“And so simply, you know, we’re just saying, look, when we do that, we’ll go off and actually check in with New Zealanders and make sure they’re comfortable with MMP.”
Standing alongside him, Party President Sylvia Wood was a little more equivocal.
“We have a policy process,” she said.
“But the leader of the party made a call. I’m 100% fine with that. We’ve discussed it with the board. And that’s where it’s at.”
Luxon responded with another reference to a referendum on a four-year term but then added: “And what I’ve decided to do with that call was to say, yep, if we’re going to go out for a four- year term, ultimately, it makes sense to actually check in with, as has happened in the past, whether they’re still comfortable with MMP. That is our position as a party now.”
It would seem, however, from Wood’s comments that the party isn’t quite as on board as Luxon is implying.
Given the time frame, obviously there has not been time for the proposal to go through the policy process.
It is presumptive moves like this by Luxon, without any consultation with the party at large or the Caucus, that irritate his Caucus MPs.
But like the polls and the party list, they would seem to add insufficient incentive to replace him at present although he continues to live dangerously.
