Prime Minister and Botany MP, Christopher Luxon, has apologised for telling business owners their job was “to be adult, adult, adult” and for describing a “parent-child mentality” in New Zealand boardrooms.
“I am sorry if my comments do not properly acknowledge the challenges that many small business owners are facing, and that I got that wrong,” he told his post-Cabinet press conference on Monday afternoon.
The remarks were made last Friday at a Rotorua Business Chamber Westpac Smarts Breakfast, where chamber chief executive Melanie Short told him businesses were absorbing rising costs they could not put on to customers without losing the customers they had left.
“We do not want to pass them on because we’re also getting less customers through the door,” Short said at the event.
“So, it’s a matter of time, how long can we hang on?”
Luxon called that framing “negative” and contrasted it with the six years he spent running a business in Chicago.
“The last person I wanted to ever talk to as a CEO was the government,” he said.
Back in New Zealand, he said, he had found “a parent-child mentality” in boardrooms, where the conversation turned to what the Government would do.
“Who cares what the government thinks or does?” he said.
“Our job is to be adult, adult, adult.”
Labour finance spokesperson Barbara Edmonds attacked the comments in a party press release on Saturday.
“These are people working seven days a week, risking their family savings, and lying awake wondering if they’ll still be open next year,” Edmonds said.
“They know how to run a business. What they’re questioning is whether this Government knows how to manage an economy.”
On Monday morning Luxon was still defending the substance of what he had said, telling RNZ’s Morning Report the point had been about partnership rather than blame, and that the “who cares what the government thinks or does” line had been taken out of context.
By mid-afternoon his position had moved.
Asked what had changed, and whether Cabinet colleagues had leaned on him, Luxon said they had not.
“No, no, I just feel that I could have expressed myself better in the way that my comments were interpreted,” he said.
“I know many small business owners are doing it tough right now,” he said.
He called small businesses “the backbone of our economy”.
The apology came at a press conference Luxon and Finance Minister Nicola Willis had planned to use for good news, including a public-private partnership deal for the Northland Expressway and a rise in business confidence.
Luxon said National had spent two and a half years “fixing the fundamentals of the economy”.
The confidence figures he was pointing to measure what firms expect rather than what they have done.
The ANZ Business Outlook survey published on 30 July put business confidence at 56.1 in July, up 19 points on June, but firms’ reports of their own past activity barely moved, and Westpac, BNZ and ASB economists were all picking the economy shrank in the June quarter.
The Botany electorate Luxon holds encompasses the East Tamaki Industrial Area and Highbrook Business Park which together form one of the largest industrial and distribution precincts in the country.
Business East Tamaki, the business association covering the precinct, says the area is home to about 2,000 businesses employing 30,000 people and generating $3 billion a year for the New Zealand economy.
