Probably should have just shut up

I do media training. One of the first things I do when I'm doing media training is to ask the person "do you fuck dogs?".

100% of the time the answer has been "no".

"Cool" I'll say. "That means the headline in the paper tomorrow will be 

So and so denies fucking dogs

and people will read that and think to themselves "well I didn't think they fucked dogs, but if they have to deny fucking dogs, maybe they do fuck dogs".

The lesson here is that a denial is often as good as an admission when it comes to media coverage.

Which brings me to this:

It was a weird speech.

If you read it, Luxon's speech was perfectly fine. Yes there are rifts that have been exposed in NZ (I don't think they've been created by Labour at all, just made more obvious in the current pandemic-y settings). Yes Luxon's best bet is to be all statesmanlike and give off the vibe he can bring the country together. But man the timing was off.

The protesters were not there to be sided with. They were there to be used as an emblem. A symptom of this Government's weakness on crime, and its tendencies to stoke division.

I'd earlier tweeted that the police were making National's campaign for 2023 easy. Run a law and order campaign and show clips of the protesters. Labour's too soft for NZ! They'll let your grandmothers get murdered! Look how they allowed protesters to take over Thorndon.

Don't fucking side with them.

And sure, you can argue that Luxon has explained that he wasn't siding with the protesters, that National is a party that's pro-vax, blah blah blah, but the vibe that people have come away with is that Luxon was looking to cash in on the protest and he's taken their side.

And that's dumb on so many levels. Because most New Zealanders will look at the protesters and sure, they may have some sympathies for them, but for the most part they'll see them as a rabble who are below them. And if Luxon is asking us to take a side - protesters or not protesters - not protesters is going to win. And the not protester side is also Jacinda Ardern's Government. 

Luxon also made the insightful suggestion that we should be reducing our public health response (mandates etc), after the Omicron peak. And look mate, fucking duh. Not long after Luxon made his speech, the PM came out and did her usual post-cabinet press conference. She addressed all the points Luxon had made, indicating that the Omicron peak was about 6 weeks away and after that we'd see a reduction in restrictions. Like had always been the plan.

Luxon would have been better shutting up. Every National person I've spoken to thinks he should have shut up. Labour was in trouble. It was bad news piling up on top of bad news. The protest was starting to really make them look bad.

In the Herald, Audrey Young absolutely nailed it in this piece (paywalled).

She opens with: 

Christopher Luxon's latest contribution to the occupation of Parliament grounds and surrounding streets reeks of opportunism.

She goes on to pick apart all of the ridiculous comments in his speech, the ill-timing of it, how he's misread the room. She then closes with this banger:

Protesters throwing human excrement during police manoeuvres this morning reinforces the distance between us and them. They are not us, and not even close.

I've spoken to senior National strategists who tell me that he's weirdly following the Bridges' template. Always trying to inject himself into the conversation because he runs the risk of becoming irrelevant. There was a conviction that he needed to push on from what's viewed as a good start. The concern internally is that he's actually really boring and he may very well become irrelevant in 6-12 months time.

Luxon is probably saved by the fact that it's only really political hard-outs that will have noticed the speech. And those hard-outs will know who they're voting for anyway. But if he's to have a chance of leading National to Government in 2023 he better learn from his mistakes. 

There's a legend that in 2005, Key defeated Michael Cullen in the finance spokesperson's debate. He didn't. He was smashed. And the day after the debate he got on the phone and admitted that he might need some media training after all. The rest is history.

But Key knew he had flaws. Luxon seems to think he's god's gift. He was an airline CEO don't you know? But Luxon would pay to listen to the advice of one National person who text me "it's probably hard not knowing when to shut up, but when in doubt, shut up."