Like Ricky Gervais’ David Brent, Christopher Luxon has an unfounded sense of personal charm, while disparaging his colleagues behind their backs.

His lack of understanding of the National Party means that anything he says about another MP quickly comes back to them.

However, Luxon’s lack of understanding of New Zealand, partly but not solely because he lived overseas from 1995 to 2011, is more serious.

When he left, the economy was booming under Prime Minister Jim Bolger, there was a structural surplus, and corporate welfare had been brought under control.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall but before September 11, our international relations were less complicated, despite the anti-nuclear policy. A free trade agreement (FTA) with China was unimaginable, and a deal like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) almost was.

Back home, only one iwi had concluded a treaty and the first MMP elections had not taken place, nor the lessons of coalition management.

When Luxon returned, National was back in government, under Prime Minister John Key, supported by Act, United Future and the Māori Party.

Despite Key’s resumption of borrowing, the debt was still low after the Bolger-Shipley and Clark governments paid off everything. After 20 years of unrest, health was no longer in the headlines. On the other hand, corporate welfare had been restored by Helen Clark’s government and worsened by Key’s.

China had become our most important market after the FTA, and the TPP was being negotiated, notably with the United States.

At the same time, Winston Peters had begun to restore defense relations with the United States, after establishing excellent relations with George W. Bush’s Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice.

During his absence, Luxon also missed the racial division sown by Clark’s mishandling of the foreshore and seabed issue and Don Brash’s Orewa speech, but also the healing that followed.

By the time Luxon returned, more than 40 treaties had been concluded and nearly 20 were in preparation, helping to make Māori major players in the economy.

The principles of the Treaty of Waitangi, which had been clearly defined by the Court of Appeal and the Privy Council a quarter of a century earlier, were deeply embedded in law and practice.

There has been bipartisan consensus on climate change policy.

In all of these policy areas, Luxon does not seem to understand how difficult progress has been, nor how fragile it is, especially for a small, isolated agrarian economy.

Perhaps it didn’t matter, except that Luxon seemed to display little to no curiosity about the country he wished to rule. The casual observer might conclude that if they didn’t already know something, it wasn’t worth bothering with.

His record at Air New Zealand was mixed. He failed to forge a strong network even in the Auckland business community, let alone from a broader perspective.

Deprived of a deep understanding of the New Zealand economy and its recent development, Luxon had nothing to offer except modest but unaffordable tax cuts and the belief that his mere election could motivate a boom economic.

After a year in power, it would be acceptable to continue blaming the previous government for most of New Zealand’s economic problems, if Luxon were able to articulate a program to address them.

But, as Professor Robert MacCulloch, right-wing chair of macroeconomics at the University of Auckland explained in the Herald yesterdaythere is none.

Marginal tinkering will do nothing to solve New Zealand’s productivity and growth crises.

Luxon language is often considered business talk, but no real businessman uses this much corporate chatter.

Its language is more like a cheap self-help book.

Extraordinarily, he communicates even less substantively in the media and in person than the lamentable Dame Jacinda Ardern.

Worse still, if Luxon sincerely believes that New Zealand’s long-term budget and health crises can be solved by much-needed cost cuts only in Wellington, then he is as uncountable as he seems illiterate.

Arguably, Clark and Key possessed the knowledge, intelligence, and personal qualities necessary to chart a middle course between China and the United States, but Luxon shows no signs of this.

Neither Xi Jinping nor Donald Trump are likely to be influenced by a shoulder hold, a Luxon smile and trite slogans, except negatively.

Yet the Treaty of Waitangi and race relations are the areas where Luxon’s lack of history, understanding and foresight threatens the most harm.

Luxon cannot say that he was not warned, including by all living National Party Prime Ministers and more widely, that his handling of the Act Treaty Principles Bill was wrong and could not benefit only Act and Te Pāti Māori, while seriously harming both. New Zealand’s social cohesion and national electoral interests.

As party leader, he had two options during negotiations with Act: accept their policies or reject them. If he wanted to be an effective prime minister, he only had the latter option.

Act insists he has not declared the bill as a goal in coalition negotiations, but only as an important priority.

If so, it is not true that Luxon had to accept the compromise.

Nonetheless, despite claiming without evidence to have extensive experience in mergers and acquisitions, Luxon opted for the worst possible option, angering Māori while bitterly dividing his own party.

He belatedly admitted the obvious: it is not the role of a single parliament to redefine the meaning of the Treaty of Waitangi after 184 years of debate, but it is nothing more than what he was advised to do at the time. departure, if he had listened to his own advisors and high-ranking MPs.

Despite this late realization, Luxon proved too weak personally and politically to exercise his authority as Prime Minister and decide that suppressing the bill before its introduction was in the best interests of the country and the party.

As in the country as a whole, he is now rightly seen as powerless by both the National Liberals and Conservatives, and as a favorite in negotiations by his coalition partners.

Luxon’s leadership of the country and party will stumble without achieving much and without meaning. He will remain Prime Minister only because he lacks the self-awareness to know that it would be better for New Zealand and his own reputation to accept that he is completely out of his depth.

In the meantime, he could at least understand that his ministers are not some sort of Ilford Second XI led by Sir Donald Bradman, but that at least half of them would do their job much better than him.