John MacDonald: Here's why Christopher Luxon had to apologise

Author: John MacDonald,
Publish Date: Tue, 4 Aug 2026, 12:47pm

Follow the podcast on

There are two types of people in the world.

There are the ones who think Prime Minister Christopher Luxon shouldn’t be apologising for what he said to business owners at a meeting in Rotorua the other day.

And there are the ones who think he should. And I’m one of them.

Because what he said was so dismissive and so tone deaf, that he had no other option but to apologise. Which he did yesterday.

What happened, is the Prime Minister was at a business breakfast in Rotorua organised by the local Chamber of Commerce. Which, you would think, would be the type of gathering where there’d be absolutely no chance of him putting his foot in it.

Because business people are his people, aren’t they?

But he did. And, quite rightly, he has apologised. Because if I was one of those business owners at that event, I would be furious.

It happened when the Rotorua Business Chamber’s Melanie Short stood up and said the city had experienced the “sharpest fall” in business confidence in almost a decade.

She said: “The affordability of doing business, it’s getting harder and harder. How long can we hang on?”

Christopher Luxon, though, wasn’t having any of that sort of talk.

He told her that her view was “quite negative”. He said New Zealand businesses needed to move away from a “parent-child mentality” of waiting to see what the government is going to do for them.

“Who cares what the government will think or do?”, he said. Which I thought was a staggering comment to make, considering he is the leader of a political party that bangs on all the time about National being the party for business people.

Thankfully, the Chamber of Commerce boss wasn’t going to be shut down and went on to tell him about the Chamber’s Business Pulse survey, that’s done twice a year.

She told him that the latest survey had found optimism among members in relation to where the economy is going had dropped 62 percent.

And that members’ confidence in their own businesses had dropped 43 percent. And that they were absorbing a lot of the rising costs they’re dealing with, rather than passing them on.

Because business is down enough, without giving customers more reasons not to buy their products or use their services.

But Luxon was having none of it.

He told the people in the room that, if they weren’t “retooling and radically disrupting” their businesses then “you ain’t doing your job”.

He said he knew the reality of running a business. And said when he was, “the last person I wanted to ever talk to as a CEO was the government.”

He said: “I’m a business person. I’m building a kick-ass company that actually has commercially superior returns, great customer experience and awesome internal culture.”

And he went on to say that, when he returned to New Zealand after working overseas, he found that business people here had a “parent-child mentality” and were too hung up on what the government was going to do for them rather than just getting on with it.

He said: “Who cares what the government thinks or does? Our job is to be adult, adult, adult”. Telling his audience to “go out there and smack it and go create the road”.

Over the weekend, his office was complaining that his comments hadn’t been reported accurately.

But, by late yesterday, he realised he’d put his foot in it and apologised. As he had to do.

Because, even though he’s a former chief executive of Air New Zealand and even though he’s had very senior roles with Unilever in Canada and the U.S., Christopher Luxon has never done what most of those people in that business breakfast have done.

He has never started or owned his own business. He’s been the highest paid employee of some big business organisations, but he’s got no experience of opening or running a business of his own.

Particularly, a small business. Which most businesses in this country are. Which, apparently, are best represented by the party Christopher Luxon leads.

LISTEN ABOVE