Everyone comes at Nicola Willis as Luxon hides
The GDP result for the June quarter was 3 times worse than the RBNZ had forecast
Partially open
While Rome burns, Christopher Luxon spent the day at the Institute of Directors 2025 Leadership Conference. The Prime Minister is one of 50 speakers at the two day conference, which means he really wasn’t needed at all - but I’m guessing Luxon is more comfortable back in corporate schmooze town, where he gave closing remarks on Day one.
Just before closing, Luxon would have heard from business woman Izzy Fenwick, who talked about “Nature is business”. And he would have rubbed shoulders through the day with folks like NZME Board member Bowen Pan and KPMG’s Chair Matt Pritchard.
It’s increasingly likely that the uber unpopular Luxon will be replaced before the 2026 election so it makes an incredible amount of sense that Luxon would prefer to go back to where he’s most comfortable - in an environment where his pathological lies are less evident, where he might still be able to feign sincerity and competence, to what he hopes is a less exacting audience, or maybe in his mind, “better stakeholders”.
Who knows? Board appointments and lucrative deals are waiting for a former New Zealand Prime Minister, even one as incompetent and weak as Luxon has proven to be.
Luxon told a journalist in the morning that he hadn’t heard about the economic news, before disappearing off the news cycle for the rest of the day, leaving Willis to front up to press
And have no doubt, Rome is burning. The long forecasted “economic and social pain is coming” is at our doorstep, with a whopping 0.9% drop in GDP in the June quarter. That’s 3 times what the RBNZ was expecting, and almost double what the big banks forecast.
Adding to the woes of the 18,000 job losses in construction after National stopped most infrastructure programs, Stats NZ showed more bad news for the sector:
“Construction activity fell across a range of measures in June 2025 quarter, not just GDP. The value of building work put in place, a key input to GDP, fell 2.2%, and filled jobs in the construction industry fell 1.3%,”
Overall, the economy is down 1.4% or ~$1 billion since the 2023 election.
