Luxon can't name a single councillor who's asked him for more funding

An AI-generated image of Christopher Luxon panicking.

During Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s controversial speech at Local Government New Zealand’s SuperLocal Conference, he alleged that elected representatives from local government often told him that they agreed with the need to reign in “white elephants” and just wanted to “get back to delivering the basics brilliantly,” but they also followed that up by telling him that they “just need more help from central government, usually in the form of cold, hard cash.”

So Local Aotearoa used the Official Information Act to ask the Prime Minister to list “any and all” elected representatives from local government who had told him - through any medium or meeting - words to that effect.

Unsurprisingly, the Prime Minister’s office couldn’t list a single person.

Not one mayor, not one councillor, not even a community board member.

The excuse provided by Luxon’s Chief of Staff Cameron Burrows was that the “Prime Minister regularly meets, often in informal settings, with elected representatives from local government, who raise requests for additional financial support from central government for a range of initiatives.”

They then went on to decline the OIA request because the information requested was not held by the Prime Minister.

I don’t doubt that some local government leaders do ask Luxon and ministers in his government for additional funding. Often those requests are going to be for new revenue streams that they can choose to use rather than having to go cap in hand to the Beehive whenever a new project needs funding.

But frankly it’s just embarrassing if the Prime Minister is going to allege in a speech he’s often asked by local government leaders for “cold, hard cash” and then he’s not able to name a single one. Surely it can’t be that hard to find even a handful of local government elected representatives who had told Luxon that.

A less generous publication could be left thinking that the Prime Minister was just making things up.