Less than three months before the New Zealand election,
the National Party, the biggest party in the coalition
government, was thrown into turmoil this week by a
leadership challenge against Prime Minister Christopher
Luxon.
Luxon called an urgent caucus meeting on August
12 after media reports that an inner-party coup was being
prepared. An unnamed MP told the New Zealand Herald two days
earlier that “there’s going to be change” of
leadership and “it’s just a question of who is going to
be it.”
After a three-and-a-half-hour meeting of
MPs, Luxon told journalists at parliament that he had
survived a confidence vote. “I have the full support of
our caucus, and our caucus is united and it is determined to
win this election,” he said, without revealing the
breakdown of the vote.
The claim of unity was patently
false. A few hours later Luxon sacked Defence Minister Chris
Penk for launching the leadership challenge, saying his role
had become “untenable.” According to numerous media
reports, Penk was chosen as a “fall guy” after other
senior MPs plotted to remove Luxon but could not agree among
themselves on who should replace him.
Penk has not
explained his reasons or who he was working with. Education
Minister Erica Stanford and Housing Minister Chris Bishop,
who were named by the Herald as “front runners” to
replace Luxon, have publicly denied any
involvement.
The prime minister’s position remains
extremely precarious. He reportedly survived a previous
confidence vote in April by a margin of just 27 to 22 votes.
A third leadership challenge cannot be ruled out.
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The
National Party is in a serious crisis; it is heading into
the election campaign with around 29 percent support in
recent polls. National only scraped into power following the
October 2023 election by forming a coalition with the
far-right New Zealand First and ACT Parties. It benefited
from a collapse in support for the previous Labour Party
government, which had presided over increasing homelessness,
plummeting real wages and rising child poverty.
If the
right-wing coalition does not return to office, it would be
the first one-term government since the
1970s.
Underlying the National Party’s turmoil and
collapse in support is the shift by the entire political
establishment further and further to the right. The
coalition government is imposing brutal austerity measures,
including cuts to education, healthcare, social welfare and
housing programs. It is diverting billions of dollars to the
military in order to integrate the country into US-led wars
and war preparations, especially against China.
The
government’s agenda is increasingly being shaped by the
widely-despised ACT and NZ First, whose leader Winston
Peters is also the foreign minister and has repeatedly
undermined Luxon’s authority.
Last month Peters
unleashed a tirade against a Chinese-born Green Party MP,
telling him to “go back to your own country.” The
Chinese embassy lodged a formal complaint. Luxon admitted
that Peters’ comments were racist but declared that he
retained confidence in the foreign minister. Sacking Peters
would certainly have broken up the coalition and brought on
an early election.
According to the Herald, the
attempt to remove Luxon was triggered in part by his
statement during a radio interview on August 6 that he
wanted a referendum on the country’s Mixed Member
Proportional (MMP) voting system. He implied that the
system, adopted in 1993, had undermined “strong and stable
government” by favouring coalitions, adding: “I don’t
need some yahoo or numpty from some other party” sitting
around the cabinet table.
Peters denounced the
referendum idea as “a power grab,” writing on social
media: “Now that the two old parties are losing their grip
on power, they want to change the electoral system to favour
their falling fortunes.”
A fundamental source of
instability is the differences within the coalition over how
openly the government should align against China, which is
New Zealand’s most important trading
partner.
Successive Labour and National-led
governments have identified China and Russia as strategic
“threats” and participated in the US-led militarisation
of the Indo-Pacific region and provocative exercises aimed
against China.
The Luxon government has backed the US
attack on Venezuela, the war against Iran, and the ongoing
US-Israeli genocide with Gaza. It actively supports the
US-NATO war against Russia over Ukraine.
With NZ
First’s Peters playing a central role, the government has
also pushed back aggressively against Chinese influence in
the Pacific. Last year, Wellington temporarily cut aid to
the Cook Islands in retaliation for the territory’s
commercial agreements with China.
At the same time,
Luxon remains cautious in his rhetoric and clearly wants to
avoid damaging trade relations with Beijing, particularly as
the global economic crisis intensifies due to the war
against Iran. The repeated anti-Chinese provocations by NZ
First threaten to completely destabilise the government’s
tightrope act.
Tensions over China within the National
Party itself have been a major factor in previous leadership
changes. In 2018, while the party was in opposition, leader
Simon Bridges faced an internal destabilisation campaign
after he accepted significant donations from a Chinese
businessman.
Bridges was replaced by Todd Muller as
leader in May 2020. Muller lasted only 53 days before
announcing his resignation; he had argued for increased
trade with China and also defended Chinese-born National
Party MP Jian Yang, who resigned following unsubstantiated
claims that he was a Chinese spy.
Luxon was elevated
to the leadership in 2021, replacing Judith Collins, who had
maintained the precarious balancing act between the US and
China. Luxon, a former chief executive of Air New Zealand,
has taken a similar stance.
The involvement of Defence
Minister Penk in this week’s coup attempt may well
indicate that some National MPs want a more explicit
alignment against China. Penk was also the minister in
charge of New Zealand’s spy agencies, which work in close
partnership with their US counterparts in the Five Eyes
alliance, and which regularly issue statements accusing
China of spying on New Zealand.
In May, Penk told the
Shangri-La Dialogue security forum in Singapore that New
Zealand should have a “conversation” about changing its
anti-nuclear policy to allow nuclear-powered vessels to
enter the country’s waters. Australia is seeking to
acquire nuclear-powered attack submarines through the AUKUS
pact, which is part of the transformation of Australia into
a frontline base of operations for war against China. Luxon
was forced to contradict Penk, declaring that no policy
change was being considered.
Media pundits pushing for
intensified militarism and deeper austerity have denounced
the failure of the National Party leadership coup. Most
notably, the Post’s right-wing editor Matthew Hooton told
Three News it was “shameful” that National MPs could not
unite behind one person to replace Luxon, and called on the
prime minister to resign.
Yesterday’s Post editorial
described National as “a circus controlled by clowns”
and said the government “has completely failed on all the
most important National Party metrics—productivity,
economic growth, inflation, unemployment and debt.” In
other words, the government must make deeper spending cuts
to essential public services and do more to boost profits by
driving down workers’ real wages.
Hooton has
previously called for New Zealand troops to be deployed to
the Cook Islands to assert colonial domination and stave off
China’s influence. He also supports the reintroduction of
compulsory military training as a means to address
unemployment—a policy that has been suggested by NZ
First.
Opposition Labour Party leader Chris Hipkins,
meanwhile, told a media conference on August 12 that the
National Party was in “no fit state to provide the sort of
leadership the country needs.” He said the government
should be focused on “tackling the cost of living,”
boosting jobs and “fixing the crisis in our health
system.”
All of this is thoroughly hypocritical.
Labour lost the 2023 election in a landslide amid soaring
living costs, a housing crisis, and a public health
disaster, after it imposed austerity measures and ended
efforts to stop the spread of COVID-19.
Labour agrees
with National on the need to double military spending and
greatly expand recruitment. The last Labour government
strengthened ties with the US, deployed troops to Britain to
train Ukrainian conscripts to fight Russia, and explicitly
stated that New Zealand had to prepare for a possible war in
the South China Sea, i.e. against China. In the lead-up to
the election, Hipkins defended Israel’s genocidal
bombardment of Gaza.
While Hipkins recently ruled out
working with NZ First, the Labour Party and the Greens
formed a coalition with the far-right, racist party between
2017 and 2020, and Winston Peters was made the foreign
minister.
The next government, whoever leads it, will
continue to ramp up the exploitation of the working class
and accelerate the militarisation of the country. The
working class can only fight back politically by building
its own party, based on a socialist and internationalist
program.
By Tom Peters, Socialist Equality Group
14
August 2026
Original url:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/08/14/dbkq-a14.html
