Prime Minister Luxon and the problem with running a country like a business

Monday, 10 November 2025

Christopher Luxon circa 2014, when he had the relatively straightforward job of running an airline.

James Bush is a womenswear designer and teaches at Massey University. He is a regular opinion contributor.

OPINION: I run a small business and as such, I am used to juggling lots of priorities. My product has to be perfect and my vendors and suppliers have to be happy. My customers have to feel listened to, but also surprised and delighted by the things I produce. I have equipment to maintain, inventory to manage, and an image to cultivate, and at the end of the month, if the money coming in doesn’t match the money going out the door I am ultimately responsible.

When I hear leaders talking about how the Government needs to be run more like a business I often wonder what the f… they’re on about. I have a difficult and complicated job for sure, but it’s nothing like the complexities of running the prison system or planning for natural disasters. I make clothes, and sure, there’s a fair amount of logistical complexity in managing a production run, but If you asked me to respond to a public health emergency, or a downturn in global bond markets… let’s be honest, we’d be in deep trouble.

New Zealand’s leaders and its government have a difficult job to do. People expect Scandinavian-level outcomes on a middle-income budget, with American-level taxes. The same logic frameworks that you would use for something like, I don’t know… an airline is not going to help you solve multi-generational poverty or family violence. This expectations gap can’t be addressed by someone who thinks of themselves first as a “brand manager”.

Christopher Luxon continued comparisons of running a country to running a business have missed a number of points, argues James Bush.

In February 2024, newly elected PM Christopher Luxon, addressed the CEOs of the major government agencies. He spoke about leadership, or at least what it meant to him. It has now entered cultural lore that he recommended his favourite books on the subject to the assembled leaders.

I don’t want to jump to conclusions, but there’s a particular type of management tome that serves up thinly disguised self-help affirmations to the feeble minded. The problem isn’t the books themselves. It’s that he genuinely buys into the bullshit aura of managerial brilliance that surrounds them. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Good to Great might be fantastic references if your biggest workplace dilemma is how to motivate your sales team to sell more yoghurt – but the government is a little more complicated than that.

From that meeting onward, Luxon moved at pace, loudly declaring his dislike and distrust for what he saw as a bloated and inefficient machine that needs to “focus on the customer, which is New Zealand”. I see his point, but the needs of New Zealand are so great and varied that simplifying the country into one “customer” is frankly ridiculous.

Christopher Luxon at a press conference about the release of the royal commission report into abuse in state care, in 2024. The government is about serving everyone, writes James Bush - Including the unprofitable, the complicated and the messy.

Apart from anything else, a business can decide who its customers are. A government’s customers are whoever happens to be born, shipwrecked, or tax-resident within its borders. You can’t just cancel underperforming regions the way an airline pulls out of unprofitable routes. The government operates in markets that the private sector won’t touch… and that’s kind of the point.

Luxon’s background as CEO of Air New Zealand (2018 revenue NZ$5.8b) and Deodorants Category Director at Unilever Canada sounds impressive, until you compare it with something like the health or the education budget and you realise these agencies are managing budgets and workforces many multiples larger.

Private sector management is about profit and pleasing shareholders. It’s about measurable results and growth. The government is about serving everyone. Including the unprofitable, the complicated and the messy. It must provide services with no short-term financial payoffs and it must do so in an environment of limited resources and constant political uncertainty.

Those are not, unfortunately, issues that can easily be fixed with the application of a KPI dashboard and an agile approach to project management.

In a funny way the complexities of government and fashion cross over. There are so many moving parts, not in the least because of the basic makeup of the human body. Much like our population, the body comes in many different variants. There’s shape, proportion and agility, then there’s skin tone, colour palette, cultural and fit preferences, so it’ s impossible to make everything work for everyone all the time.

Add to that the complexities of design and production. Plus, one never really knows if something will work until it’s been tested.

One thing it teaches you is the humility to know you can’t propose a universal solution to something that’s beyond your means, and that there’s a limit to how far you can get with one seemingly good idea.

At the heart of Luxon’s problem is a category error. The government is complicated and messy. It’s more than direct sales and delivering for a customer. But with its provision of education, security, markets regulation and financial stability it should be able to create an environment in which airlines - or womenswear brands - can flourish.

For Luxon, perhaps the most important difference is that in business, you can sack your customers. In government, the “customers” get to sack you.