Christopher Luxon says there are five ‘moaning and frustrated’ National MPs marring discipline

Monday, 20 April 2026

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon estimates there are five “moaning and frustrated” National MPs talking to the media but he will deal with the issue at Tuesday’s caucus.

Luxon also told his morning media slots that he doesn’t believe a poll that shows Labour being re-elected, but he does understand that “not everyone wants me at their barbecue”.

He was speaking on his regular Monday morning media slots after a TVNZ/Verian poll showed National crashing to 30%, with no path to power for Luxon.

The poll came after a flurry of speculation about Luxon’s leadership last week, prompted by another poor poll for National and a story in the NZ Herald that suggested Luxon had “ghosted” senior whip Stuart Smith a few weeks ago, when he was looking to tell Luxon about a lack of confidence among some MPs.

Read more:

• New poll has National just in the 30s - but Labour winning Government

• Chris Bishop says he’s not aware of anyone wanting to roll PM, but National needs to get vote up

• Christopher Luxon says he has caucus behind him, and would win an election if held today

Luxon has pushed back against this story, noting that he spent a day with Smith last week and he was “completely unaware” any reported push to meet him earlier.

Speaking to Newstalk ZB, however, Luxon did admit to some level of caucus disquiet.

“There'll be a handful of people who will understandably be disgruntled,” Luxon said. “There's probably five people that are, you know, moaning and frustrated.”

Luxon said he would look to talk about the importance of discipline at Tuesday morning’s caucus meeting.

“We need to reiterate the case for why we need discipline. Because we've seen the cases as we've had from our own experience as a National Party, where we broke the party essentially in a civil war - that's just counterproductive. We're a long way from that. It's just that any, any sign of this, you want to stamp it out early.”

He suggested part of the issue was the size of his caucus and there not being enough jobs to go around.

“We're 49 MPs. Big caucus. We're in government. All 49 would love to be ministers. I get it that it's impossible for that to happen, and so, you know, a lot of them are working incredibly hard on their select committees and their local communities, doing an amazing job, and I want them all coming back.”

On current polling around a dozen MPs would lose their job.

Luxon: Not everyone wants me at their BBQ, but they don’t want Hipkins as PM

Luxon said the National Party needed to do better but he didn’t trust polls that jumped around so much - with two polls in recent weeks showing the coalition returning and another showing the left bloc winning.

“I get it people. Not everyone will want me at their barbecue,” Luxon told Newstalk ZB.

Speaking to TVNZ’s Breakfast, he pushed back against the veracity of its polling.

“You cannot tell me that your viewers today want to put Chris Hipkins in as prime minister and actually want to elect a Labour/Greens/Te Pāti Māori Government. I just don't believe that,” Luxon said.

Host Tova O’Brien pushed back noting the poll was not of their viewers but of a randomly selected and weighted sample of over 1000 Kiwis.

Luxon said he was working to not be bounced around by polls given how different they could be week to week.

“It was a sample of 1000 people, just like the previous poll last week was another sample of 1000 people that said completely different things.”

The poll he was referring to, for ANACTA/Talbot Mills, had National at 29 - not far off the TVNZ result - but had a far stronger NZ First and far weaker Greens and Labour result - meaning that it showed the coalition returning to Government.