Jack Tame
speaker
255 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 11 Aug
Jack Tame’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
I wouldn't bet the House on it, but if I was forced to make a call, I would say yes. I think it's much likelier than not that Christopher Luxon will be rolled as Prime Minister today. I don't know who his replacement will be, but if you look at it from the perspective of his caucus, he had that vote of confidence in April, and I've been making calls over the last week and a half or so, and it's been pretty clear to me that there are members in that national caucus
who supported Christopher Luxon last time round, whose confidence in him has diminished in the time since that last vote. And honestly, some of them are really quite angry with components of his leadership. So yeah, I mean, I don't think anyone can say with certainty exactly what's going to happen when they go into that meeting room this morning. But one thing I'd say is the damage is done either way, right?
So let's imagine for a moment that somehow he survives this. So what we've got a prime minister who's fewer than 100 days from an election, who's basically faced two major challenges to his leadership from his own colleagues. I mean, it's hardly the kind of firm footing that the party would want to be on going into an election. So I would have thought, given the events of the last 24 hours, it's very unlikely that the party won't ultimately decide to replace him.
So there was a big meeting yesterday and then there's another one today. What was each of those meetings for? No, so they didn't have the meeting yesterday. Usually they would have a meeting, like a Zoom meeting in the evening, but they decided not to have that yesterday and instead he called an in-person meeting. Yeah, and so it's a recess week in Parliament, so the pollies wouldn't be, or a lot of them wouldn't be in Wellington this week.
So they've all had to hustle down there over the last 24 hours or so to be there in person this morning. But by being there in person, it's a lot easier for them to have a vote and to have some of those pretty robust conversations. I mean, there is a school of thought that actually, from a strategic perspective, if Luxem was trying to hang on, which...
we understand he has been, that it was actually the wrong call to call the meeting. Like if you've got challenges, let them take that first big step, you know, and that actually maybe if he hadn't called an in-person meeting, it might not have pushed the issue and he perhaps had a greater chance of surviving. But yeah, so they're all in Wellington, 9.30 this morning. I reckon it'll be very fast. We'll find out very quickly whether or not Luxon is gone. And the question is, if he is, what happens thereafter?
Jack Tame, how risky is this for the National Party? It's definitely risky. I mean, if they keep Luxon, it's messy. If they ditch Luxon, it's messy. And there's a kind of conventional wisdom that comes with leadership spills that suggests that those who are agitating for change...
often underestimate just how messy it's going to be. So even if they are better communicators, so you take the frontrunners that have been discussed over the last day or so, the likes of Erica Stanford and Chris Bishop, I mean, they are, I think, objectively much stronger communicators in public than the Prime Minister, and the Prime Minister would acknowledge that at times his communications eat him down.
Well, that's all well and good, but then when you have the scrutiny that comes with having rolled your boss for the job and you have some really disgruntled colleagues who feel like you've been disloyal and feel like their career prospects have been hurt because of your decision, it gets a whole lot trickier. So even though the conventional wisdom says it would be messy if they roll them, there is another way to look at it, and that's the kind of Jacinda effect.
that Jacinda Ardern had after Andrew Little stood down. The difference that time was that Andrew Little voluntarily stood down. So he didn't cling on and try to hold on to his position. He saw the writing on the wall, and quite magnanimously, I think, certainly relative to lots of other leadership skills, quite magnanimously, he stepped aside and she stepped in, so the whole party was able to come in behind her. There's nothing to suggest that this situation is going to be like that. The one...
Yeah, and give my mum a nice kiss and my partner a nice kiss as well from the kids.
25 December 1990.
You'd be so welcome.
That would be a great show.
I mean, you probably are in a much better position to talk about this than me, but as a fellow proud Australian, I'm an Australian citizen.
You?
Yeah.
You're from Christchurch.
Yeah, I know, but my mum was from Australia, so I got the passport.
I've known you for 23 years.
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