April 21, 2026 • 10 mins
Tonight on The Huddle, former Auckland mayor Phil Goff and Auckland Councillor Maurice Williamson joined in on a discussion about the following issues of the day - and more!
Did Luxon do the right thing in calling the leadership vote? Do we think he's safe in his seat for now? What about after the election?
Shane Jones' infamous 'butter chicken' comments - what do we make of this?
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The huddle with New Zealand Southeby's international realty, a name
you can trust locally and globally.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Huddle this evening, Phil GoF former Labor minister, Auckland mayor
Morris Williams and Auckland councilor former National Party minister.
Speaker 3 (00:11):
High lads, Yeah today Morris?
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Okay?
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Phil?
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Do you agree with me? Or Winston? I say Luxeon
did the right thing calling that leadership vote today. Winston
says it was a mistake.
Speaker 4 (00:22):
What do you say, Phil, Oh, I say it doesn't
make any real difference. Look, I don't have any personal
problem with Christopher Luxe and I found him okay to
work with.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
He's trying his best, but it's just not working for him.
Speaker 4 (00:33):
And you can't put all his speculation to bed unless
he can get the National Party vote up, unless he
can perform better in his media conferences, and unless New
Zealanders start to feel that though they've got a hope
for the future and they're better off rather than worse off.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
As long as.
Speaker 4 (00:50):
Those factors persist, there's going to be speculation, and that
speculation ultimately becomes what they call a self fulfilling prophecy.
You know, he's constantly batting it off. But yet you
don't hold a confidence vote to show that you have
the support of your caucus. Holding the confidence vate itself
shows that that's in doubt. So it's reinforced the problem
(01:11):
that he's dealing with rather than solve.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Well, then you've just come down on the side of
Winston Amingy. Okay, what about you, Morris, what do you say?
Speaker 5 (01:18):
Well, I agree to totally with Phil. Actually, and I'm
trying to give you a quick analogy. If you're running
a big company and its sales figures are dropping, and
they've been dropping constantly on a downward forty five degree
slide for years, the shareholders in the workforce of that company,
you're going to start looking to the senior management and
the CEO and say, hey, guys, what are you doing
to turn the ship around?
Speaker 3 (01:37):
Now?
Speaker 5 (01:37):
If you do a sort of a circuit breaker like
pricing structures or marketing strategy or product that's you'll change
it and you'll start to get back in the market
and sell. If the sales just keep dropping, you can't
just keep saying, oh, the workforce have got confidence in me?
Is the chief executive? Well, the poor buggers on the
factory floor are looking at losing their jobs and they're
going to be gone. They're going to start saying one day, hey,
(01:59):
it's it's not us getting all touchy instead of upset
about things that's causing the drop. You guys at senior
management are dropping this place and we want it changed
and constantly saying that the public like our product and
it's better than the others and so on, when it's not.
And every pole it's been coming out recently showing it's
not that just won't even rustle the leaves on a tree.
So I agree with Phil, this won't make any difference
(02:22):
of anything. It will probably exacerbate backbenches into more anger
and disruption.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Okay, So then okay, Phil Barry Soper says that he
is okay, this is Luxe and that Luxeon is okay
and like absolutely through to the election and he will
not be rolled.
Speaker 4 (02:36):
You don't think that, well, I think you know, both
Bryce and I have been in caucuses where leaders have changed.
The funny thing about if you look at the history
of changing the leadership, whether it was more taking over
from Palm or Shipley taking over from Boulger, or Colins
taking over from Muller. It actually doesn't make much difference
(02:57):
if the people out there feel that the part is
not delivering, that it doesn't have the ideas, that it
doesn't have the people.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
You can put whoever you like up there.
Speaker 4 (03:06):
And I think I heard Morris say yesterday that actually
what's keeping Christopher Luxin in place is that there's nobody
better to replace him with. Now that's a kind of
a negative endorsement, but I think that's true. It's very
hard to see some you know, you haven't got a
descinder Dern in the wings there that can come in
and take a party from you know, polling in the
(03:27):
low twenties to the high thirties. I don't think any
of the names that have been mentioned are capable of
doing that.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
Mars, would you agree with that?
Speaker 3 (03:35):
You hang on?
Speaker 5 (03:36):
I want to actually say one of the things too.
While Helen Clark was Prime Minister, while John Key was
Prime Minister, there was never one loose comment sleep out
under the doorway because they were doing well, because they
were winning elections, because every time the polling came out.
So if you're delivering at the top, the bottom level
of team will just be on side and work with
you and be happy as but if you know, nothing
(03:58):
focuses the mind like the side of the gill teen
and there's a whole o of gnats that are going
to be there's a whole o of gnats that are
going to be going down the toilet and on the
seventh of November unless they turn the ship around.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
Marris, what I wanted to ask you was what lux
and strategy is today is to say this is all
a media soap opera. Thomas Coglin and everybody else made
all of this up there, and now I've changed my mind.
There aren't five people anymore. It's just the media. Stuart
Smith says, it never happened. Is anybody going to believe this?
Speaker 5 (04:25):
Well, all of that doesn't matter. All of that's irrelevant.
It's what are you polling with the public, because you
won't have all of this little you know, niggles and
who said what and my father could beat your father stuff.
It's where you're polling. And the graph of their polling
has just been on a forty five degree consistent slope downwards,
and you know he's going to have to find circuit
(04:45):
breakers to.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
Turn that around. Not worry about whether.
Speaker 5 (04:49):
He's got some disgrunt or backbench or not that won't
change anything.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Yes, a fair point, you make, All right, we'll take
a break, come back shortly and talk about Shane Jones.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Obviously the huddle with New Zealand Southeast International Realty the
only truly global brand.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
You're back of the horras, Morris Williamson, the rest of
the horrors huddle, Huddle, it's that kind of day, Morris
Williamson and Phil GoF Morris. You are you offended by
Shane Jones's about a chicken comments?
Speaker 5 (05:14):
No, Shane's just a very colorful character who has these
wonderful phrases. He's got a phenomenal vocabulary. He knows words
that I've had to look up in the dictionary. Look
if he made some comment about if we did a
trade deal with Mexico, oh, we'll have a flood of tortillas,
or if we did a trade deal with Italy, yard
there's going to be a whole lot of pizzas flooding.
And it's not a sort of thing to say, but
(05:35):
most of the ministers from India I've ever had any
dealings with always had a good sense of humor. I
don't think it's damaging and I don't think it's that racist.
It's just colorful language from Shane.
Speaker 4 (05:45):
It feel you no, And I take a less charitable
view towards what Shane Jones is doing. Look, I think
Shane Jones should be worried about immigration, not immigration. At
the moment, we're losing the population equivalent the size of
the city.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
Of Napier every year. And they are young and.
Speaker 4 (06:04):
A hard working, smart, well educated New Zealanders and they're
leaving New Zealand because they don't see that they have
a future here. Where I get offended, there's stuff like
this that, oh, you know, these Indians are going to
overwhelm our health system.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
You know it is true. You know that our hospitals.
Speaker 4 (06:21):
Are full of Indians there the doctors, they're the nurses, are.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
The orderlies, are the caregivers.
Speaker 4 (06:26):
Our health system would collapse without the Indian population. Let
me just give you something that I did on saiday.
I went to a wedding and it was a young
fellow that was head boy at Linfield College when I
was MP for Mount Roschool. And he's Indiana, came from
Mundai when he was three and his wife is Indian.
She went to Mount Roschool Grammar, so two very multicultural
(06:48):
schools in my electorate. But they had their friends there
from their school days. I mean the groom was a
management accountant with a really good job. His wife was
a doctor at Waitituckery Hospital. The friends who were Chinese, Korean, European, pacifica.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
They all had good jobs.
Speaker 4 (07:06):
And this is the immigrant population in New Zealand, the
one point five generation, working their guts out, paying their taxes,
working hard. What Shane should do is worry about the
unemployment in places like kai Coe, the drug addiction levels,
the closure of factories there, the loss of hope and.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
Any ambition there.
Speaker 4 (07:27):
If he focused on real problems instead of scapegoating Indians
or whatever other population might be part of our rich
and diverse New Zealand today, forty percent of New Aucklanders
were born overseas, he'd be doing a better service.
Speaker 3 (07:40):
To these here.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
So your problem is not so much with his comments,
it's his whole vibe against the immigrants, which I would
tend to agree with you. I disagree with him on that.
Now listen, both of you have been in council at
council level, and Morris Ustill are, so talk to me
about the met service. Let's assume that we cannot predict
what is happening with the thunderstorms that flooded Auckland three
years ago and his flooded Ellington. There to a pea
who Now, if we can't predict it, it's going to happen.
(08:03):
How do we warn people? Have we got a system?
Speaker 5 (08:05):
Well, I think you just got to get better use
of technology the whole time. We've got devices now that
go off in the middle of the night, that sort
of thing and scared.
Speaker 3 (08:13):
But Jesus out of you.
Speaker 5 (08:14):
If you've got really good computer systems and good satellite
scanning and you can see something forming an island bay
and you realize the torrential rain as you started, it
must be able to get better. I'm not saying that
there's anything wrong with what happened, but over time, I
think technology, faster processing systems, better comms devices, and the
(08:34):
ability to get into household and say you need to
get out because this is really serious. So I just
think it'll happen over time. We'll just get better and
better and better at managing it.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
And Phil, can we actually use this excuses in the
middle of the night people are sleep and we can't
do anything about it.
Speaker 3 (08:48):
No, I don't think you can use that excuse.
Speaker 4 (08:51):
I mean, I think they probably overuse the emergency warning
on your cell phone. I've got about four calls when
the cyclone was coming through.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
But look how you respond.
Speaker 4 (09:03):
I mean the disaster in Auckland in twenty twenty three
showed that the mayor and council weren't ready to deal
with the problem, and I think Mayor Brown would be
the first to acknowledge that. And the other disaster is
that in the past, when we've tried to stop an
Auckland council developers developing on floodplains, we were overruled by
(09:23):
the Environment Court under the RMA. So we've done some
stupid things over time, we meaning you know, past councils
by allowing people to build in places where it's not
safe to build, and the system failed in that regard.
And what we're failing on now, of course, is how
we cope with the fact that when people lose their
(09:44):
homes they can't get insurance. How do we help people
through that situation? And I think that's where you really
need a strong bipartisan approach across the country and council
and government working together to make sure we can protect
people who If you can't chew your house, your house
has no value and you've lost the most important investment
(10:05):
you've made. We've got to prepare for that, and we're
not prepared for that.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
We really aren't, Hey Phil, Phil, Thank you, Phil Goff,
Morris Williamson Our hutle this evening.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
For more from Hither Duplessy, Allen Drive listen live to
news talks it'd be from four pm weekdays, or follow
the podcast on iHeartRadio
The huddle with New Zealand Southeby's international realty, a name
you can trust locally and globally.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Huddle this evening, Phil GoF former Labor minister, Auckland mayor
Morris Williams and Auckland councilor former National Party minister.
Speaker 3 (00:11):
High lads, Yeah today Morris?
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Okay?
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Phil?
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Do you agree with me? Or Winston? I say Luxeon
did the right thing calling that leadership vote today. Winston
says it was a mistake.
Speaker 4 (00:22):
What do you say, Phil, Oh, I say it doesn't
make any real difference. Look, I don't have any personal
problem with Christopher Luxe and I found him okay to
work with.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
He's trying his best, but it's just not working for him.
Speaker 4 (00:33):
And you can't put all his speculation to bed unless
he can get the National Party vote up, unless he
can perform better in his media conferences, and unless New
Zealanders start to feel that though they've got a hope
for the future and they're better off rather than worse off.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
As long as.
Speaker 4 (00:50):
Those factors persist, there's going to be speculation, and that
speculation ultimately becomes what they call a self fulfilling prophecy.
You know, he's constantly batting it off. But yet you
don't hold a confidence vote to show that you have
the support of your caucus. Holding the confidence vate itself
shows that that's in doubt. So it's reinforced the problem
(01:11):
that he's dealing with rather than solve.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Well, then you've just come down on the side of
Winston Amingy. Okay, what about you, Morris, what do you say?
Speaker 5 (01:18):
Well, I agree to totally with Phil. Actually, and I'm
trying to give you a quick analogy. If you're running
a big company and its sales figures are dropping, and
they've been dropping constantly on a downward forty five degree
slide for years, the shareholders in the workforce of that company,
you're going to start looking to the senior management and
the CEO and say, hey, guys, what are you doing
to turn the ship around?
Speaker 3 (01:37):
Now?
Speaker 5 (01:37):
If you do a sort of a circuit breaker like
pricing structures or marketing strategy or product that's you'll change
it and you'll start to get back in the market
and sell. If the sales just keep dropping, you can't
just keep saying, oh, the workforce have got confidence in me?
Is the chief executive? Well, the poor buggers on the
factory floor are looking at losing their jobs and they're
going to be gone. They're going to start saying one day, hey,
(01:59):
it's it's not us getting all touchy instead of upset
about things that's causing the drop. You guys at senior
management are dropping this place and we want it changed
and constantly saying that the public like our product and
it's better than the others and so on, when it's not.
And every pole it's been coming out recently showing it's
not that just won't even rustle the leaves on a tree.
So I agree with Phil, this won't make any difference
(02:22):
of anything. It will probably exacerbate backbenches into more anger
and disruption.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Okay, So then okay, Phil Barry Soper says that he
is okay, this is Luxe and that Luxeon is okay
and like absolutely through to the election and he will
not be rolled.
Speaker 4 (02:36):
You don't think that, well, I think you know, both
Bryce and I have been in caucuses where leaders have changed.
The funny thing about if you look at the history
of changing the leadership, whether it was more taking over
from Palm or Shipley taking over from Boulger, or Colins
taking over from Muller. It actually doesn't make much difference
(02:57):
if the people out there feel that the part is
not delivering, that it doesn't have the ideas, that it
doesn't have the people.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
You can put whoever you like up there.
Speaker 4 (03:06):
And I think I heard Morris say yesterday that actually
what's keeping Christopher Luxin in place is that there's nobody
better to replace him with. Now that's a kind of
a negative endorsement, but I think that's true. It's very
hard to see some you know, you haven't got a
descinder Dern in the wings there that can come in
and take a party from you know, polling in the
(03:27):
low twenties to the high thirties. I don't think any
of the names that have been mentioned are capable of
doing that.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
Mars, would you agree with that?
Speaker 3 (03:35):
You hang on?
Speaker 5 (03:36):
I want to actually say one of the things too.
While Helen Clark was Prime Minister, while John Key was
Prime Minister, there was never one loose comment sleep out
under the doorway because they were doing well, because they
were winning elections, because every time the polling came out.
So if you're delivering at the top, the bottom level
of team will just be on side and work with
you and be happy as but if you know, nothing
(03:58):
focuses the mind like the side of the gill teen
and there's a whole o of gnats that are going
to be there's a whole o of gnats that are
going to be going down the toilet and on the
seventh of November unless they turn the ship around.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
Marris, what I wanted to ask you was what lux
and strategy is today is to say this is all
a media soap opera. Thomas Coglin and everybody else made
all of this up there, and now I've changed my mind.
There aren't five people anymore. It's just the media. Stuart
Smith says, it never happened. Is anybody going to believe this?
Speaker 5 (04:25):
Well, all of that doesn't matter. All of that's irrelevant.
It's what are you polling with the public, because you
won't have all of this little you know, niggles and
who said what and my father could beat your father stuff.
It's where you're polling. And the graph of their polling
has just been on a forty five degree consistent slope downwards,
and you know he's going to have to find circuit
(04:45):
breakers to.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
Turn that around. Not worry about whether.
Speaker 5 (04:49):
He's got some disgrunt or backbench or not that won't
change anything.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Yes, a fair point, you make, All right, we'll take
a break, come back shortly and talk about Shane Jones.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Obviously the huddle with New Zealand Southeast International Realty the
only truly global brand.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
You're back of the horras, Morris Williamson, the rest of
the horrors huddle, Huddle, it's that kind of day, Morris
Williamson and Phil GoF Morris. You are you offended by
Shane Jones's about a chicken comments?
Speaker 5 (05:14):
No, Shane's just a very colorful character who has these
wonderful phrases. He's got a phenomenal vocabulary. He knows words
that I've had to look up in the dictionary. Look
if he made some comment about if we did a
trade deal with Mexico, oh, we'll have a flood of tortillas,
or if we did a trade deal with Italy, yard
there's going to be a whole lot of pizzas flooding.
And it's not a sort of thing to say, but
(05:35):
most of the ministers from India I've ever had any
dealings with always had a good sense of humor. I
don't think it's damaging and I don't think it's that racist.
It's just colorful language from Shane.
Speaker 4 (05:45):
It feel you no, And I take a less charitable
view towards what Shane Jones is doing. Look, I think
Shane Jones should be worried about immigration, not immigration. At
the moment, we're losing the population equivalent the size of
the city.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
Of Napier every year. And they are young and.
Speaker 4 (06:04):
A hard working, smart, well educated New Zealanders and they're
leaving New Zealand because they don't see that they have
a future here. Where I get offended, there's stuff like
this that, oh, you know, these Indians are going to
overwhelm our health system.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
You know it is true. You know that our hospitals.
Speaker 4 (06:21):
Are full of Indians there the doctors, they're the nurses, are.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
The orderlies, are the caregivers.
Speaker 4 (06:26):
Our health system would collapse without the Indian population. Let
me just give you something that I did on saiday.
I went to a wedding and it was a young
fellow that was head boy at Linfield College when I
was MP for Mount Roschool. And he's Indiana, came from
Mundai when he was three and his wife is Indian.
She went to Mount Roschool Grammar, so two very multicultural
(06:48):
schools in my electorate. But they had their friends there
from their school days. I mean the groom was a
management accountant with a really good job. His wife was
a doctor at Waitituckery Hospital. The friends who were Chinese, Korean, European, pacifica.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
They all had good jobs.
Speaker 4 (07:06):
And this is the immigrant population in New Zealand, the
one point five generation, working their guts out, paying their taxes,
working hard. What Shane should do is worry about the
unemployment in places like kai Coe, the drug addiction levels,
the closure of factories there, the loss of hope and.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
Any ambition there.
Speaker 4 (07:27):
If he focused on real problems instead of scapegoating Indians
or whatever other population might be part of our rich
and diverse New Zealand today, forty percent of New Aucklanders
were born overseas, he'd be doing a better service.
Speaker 3 (07:40):
To these here.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
So your problem is not so much with his comments,
it's his whole vibe against the immigrants, which I would
tend to agree with you. I disagree with him on that.
Now listen, both of you have been in council at
council level, and Morris Ustill are, so talk to me
about the met service. Let's assume that we cannot predict
what is happening with the thunderstorms that flooded Auckland three
years ago and his flooded Ellington. There to a pea
who Now, if we can't predict it, it's going to happen.
(08:03):
How do we warn people? Have we got a system?
Speaker 5 (08:05):
Well, I think you just got to get better use
of technology the whole time. We've got devices now that
go off in the middle of the night, that sort
of thing and scared.
Speaker 3 (08:13):
But Jesus out of you.
Speaker 5 (08:14):
If you've got really good computer systems and good satellite
scanning and you can see something forming an island bay
and you realize the torrential rain as you started, it
must be able to get better. I'm not saying that
there's anything wrong with what happened, but over time, I
think technology, faster processing systems, better comms devices, and the
(08:34):
ability to get into household and say you need to
get out because this is really serious. So I just
think it'll happen over time. We'll just get better and
better and better at managing it.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
And Phil, can we actually use this excuses in the
middle of the night people are sleep and we can't
do anything about it.
Speaker 3 (08:48):
No, I don't think you can use that excuse.
Speaker 4 (08:51):
I mean, I think they probably overuse the emergency warning
on your cell phone. I've got about four calls when
the cyclone was coming through.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
But look how you respond.
Speaker 4 (09:03):
I mean the disaster in Auckland in twenty twenty three
showed that the mayor and council weren't ready to deal
with the problem, and I think Mayor Brown would be
the first to acknowledge that. And the other disaster is
that in the past, when we've tried to stop an
Auckland council developers developing on floodplains, we were overruled by
(09:23):
the Environment Court under the RMA. So we've done some
stupid things over time, we meaning you know, past councils
by allowing people to build in places where it's not
safe to build, and the system failed in that regard.
And what we're failing on now, of course, is how
we cope with the fact that when people lose their
(09:44):
homes they can't get insurance. How do we help people
through that situation? And I think that's where you really
need a strong bipartisan approach across the country and council
and government working together to make sure we can protect
people who If you can't chew your house, your house
has no value and you've lost the most important investment
(10:05):
you've made. We've got to prepare for that, and we're
not prepared for that.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
We really aren't, Hey Phil, Phil, Thank you, Phil Goff,
Morris Williamson Our hutle this evening.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
For more from Hither Duplessy, Allen Drive listen live to
news talks it'd be from four pm weekdays, or follow
the podcast on iHeartRadio
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