The new prime minister has a complicated relationship with the nation he governs. Like most leaders, Christopher Luxon finds that the country that voted him into power happens to be the best in the world: he celebrates us for the glint in our eye and fire in our soul. We climbed Everest, helped split the atom, charted waka across the ocean and are blasting rockets into space.
Yet we’re also a “negative, wet, whiny, inward-looking country that’s lost the plot”, a critique he returned to a number of times during the election campaign. In his inaugural state of the nation speech, Luxon warns that our national state
