John Key era policies are back but Prime Minister Chris Luxon’s no Key when it comes to popularity

Tuesday, 9 April 2024

Tova O’Brien is Stuff’s Chief Political Correspondent and host of the weekly political podcast, Tova.

ANALYSIS: If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Sir John Key will be blushing.

Another Key era policy has been dusted off under Christopher Luxon yet, the Prime Minister’s still struggling to bottle Key’s ‘je ne sais quoi’ that made him so incredibly popular with voters.

The latest policy is another politically popular one - the last was military style boot camps for troubled kids, now its government targets.

The public loves them - public service bosses being driven to aspirational action and held accountable if they fail. Even if, as has been the case with some targets in the past, they can be manipulated to look rosier than the reality.

Luxon’s made no secret of his admiration for his “good friend” Sir John and it’s been widely noted that the Prime Minister appears to closely model himself on Key too.

Announcing the targets, Luxon also echoed Key’s language of 12 years ago.

In June 2012, Key announced a “set of ambitious targets”, Luxon’s targets too are “ambitious”.

Key conceded “some of these targets are very aspirational – in fact, some of them will be extremely difficult to achieve”.

Twelve years on Luxon acknowledged the same, “These targets are not going to be easy to achieve. But we’re not here to do what is easy”.

Where Key wanted “targets that are going to stretch the ability of the public sector”, Luxon said his “require the public sector to think differently”.

Some of Luxon’s targets are near-identical to Key’s too - reducing the number of people on benefits, reducing violent and youth crime, shorter wait times for elective surgery, more kids in school.

All stuff that polls extremely well with voters - much like John Key did throughout his premiership.

And that’s where the Luxon emulation may end.

So far the PM seemingly hasn’t even been able to get an invite to the popularity party Key won for years as Prime Minister.

Labour’s polling company, Talbot Mills, which also provides political polling to corporate clients, has been running a comparison in its polling reports juxtaposing Luxon’s favorability to Sir John’s when he was in power.

It’s leagues apart.

Early on in his first term, Key’s net favorability rating - when you subtract those who find you unfavourable from those who find you favourable - was about 58%.

Luxon’s at the same point in his first term - that’s now - is sitting in the negative at -7%.

Key never dipped below positive 43% in his first term.

The latest Taxpayer Union Curia poll (National’s own polling company) which was conducted just days before the Talbot Mills also had Luxon’s net favourability in the negatives on -5% compared to Chris Hipkins on +2%.

Talbot Mills would not provide Stuff with Hipkins’ word cloud because Labour is their client but did share Luxon’s word cloud as part of their regular political polling.

Bearing in mind 2011 was a very different, less divided time and Key was presiding over a very different government with confidence and supply agreements with ACT, United Future and the Māori Party.

Clues as to why people respond to these two centre-right Prime Ministers - who sometimes sound uncannily similar - can be found in the classic, blunt and brutal instrument that is the ‘word cloud’.

Pollsters ask a randomly selected representative sample of voters for one word to describe a politician, the more often the word comes up, the bigger the word in the word cloud.

Regard, Key’s cloud a few years into his first term:

‘Charismatic’, ‘honest’, ‘personable’ - those were the top three words most used to describe Prime Minister John Key.

None of those words appear in Luxon’s (from March this year).

Instead the top three words used to describe him in the Talbot Mills poll (which took over the polling from UMR) are: ‘business’, ‘leader’ and ‘greedy’.

‘Unsure’, ‘arrogant’, ‘good’ and ‘entitled’ are next.

The perception of Luxon right now more closely resembles the perception of Key after his popularity had waned over eight years in power.

A few months before he resigned, Key’s word cloud screamed ‘arrogant’, ‘smarmy’, ‘smug’.

When seeking inspiration from his mentor and predecessor, it’s unlikely Luxon was angling for that version of brand Key but so far, in the public’s mind at least, that seems to be where he’s at.

*Talbot Mills took over polling from UMR and continues to poll for word clouds in the same way with a randomised online sample. The older UMR polls had a sample size of 1000 and were done less frequently, the more recent Talbot Mills poll had a sample size of 617, smaller because they now do more regular rolling polls. UMR’s polling in 2011 was the closest to the actual election result.