Election 2026: Job interview with Act’s Mt Maunganui candidate Cameron Luxton

Why should we pick you?

You should party vote for the Act Party because we’re identifying the issues that are holding us back. Debt, spending is a major one, the unaccountability of the public service and government, so reforming the public service. We’re very strong on education and we’ve got a credible plan on health. These are things that are incredibly important for New Zealand to make it more affordable for New Zealanders to access public services. These are things that Act is very strong on.

What motivates you to get up every day for work?

I saw, before getting into politics, the education system in New Zealand failing Kiwi kids. I remember in the movieBoy talking about potential and so much of it was being wasted in New Zealand. I saw the innovations in charter schools as a huge opportunity for especially disaffected kids, kids who are not fitting in the mainstream ... I want to see New Zealand succeed and I do that across my portfolio areas trying to make sure that we are moving in that direction. But when I feel like my cup’s running empty, I visit one of these charter schools and my cup fills up.

What are your strengths?

My strengths are a practical background. Like I left school quite young, went and did a building trade, started building in Pāpāmoa and after that I went and became a dairy farmer because I always wanted to be a dairy farmer. So I moved to a place called Galatea, it’s about 45 minutes to an hour south of Whakatāne, the same distance from Rotorua to the east. So practical farming and building. I’m a business owner who came back to my hometown Pāpāmoa, started a building company, employed people. So the practical realities on the ground is something that I bring to Parliament.

What are your weaknesses?

Staying fit. So going from a practical life, carrying a tool belt around, moving cows and being on site ... if you want to perform well in Parliament, you need to be able to be physically and mentally healthy, and so staying on top of that is a bit of a weakness.

Tell me about your greatest professional achievement.

I started managing a dairy farm and really brought the production up incredibly high, worked on the infrastructure on the farm, on the culture, on having good people. So I’m proudest of what I was able to achieve on that dairy farm.

Tell me about a time where you failed or made a mistake and how you handled it.

As a building apprentice, I didn’t take the opportunities to expand my knowledge early enough. So specifically site layout, concreting and things like that. So I learned a lot when I was a teenager, but ... if I had been more willing to go and get out of the comfort zone of the employment I was in and go and try to expand my skillset. ... I would have been able to sign off my apprenticeship a lot sooner, so that was a big failure, but rectified that later on.

What strategies do you use to manage stress?

I’m not actually that stressed a person, so managing stress maybe just going inside my own brain and my own mind and staying calm, observing my own feelings and behaviour ... I’ve been around people growing up who can’t manage stress, so I learned pretty young how to manage stress.

Where do you see yourself and Mount Maunganui in five years?

I see myself as a core part of making sure that Tauranga is taken seriously. People talk about how fantastic the potential of Tauranga is, part of the golden triangle and we’ve got everything going for us here. But I think we’ve been taken for granted quite a bit. That’s changing now ... Perhaps we’ve been, as a town, unwilling to share our vote, so we’ve been taken for granted and overlooked. I think you can see that in our transport projects being delayed, restarted, costing more ... I can see Tauranga as a highly connected town where we can have roading infrastructure, network infrastructure, ports that get our products to the world and also innovative new technologies like ground effect vehicles connecting Tauranga to the Auckland CBD in the future. I think if we look forward to what Tauranga’s got to offer, connecting to the world, not just our skills and our produce and our people, but also bringing people here and seeing that this is an amazing place to live and producing more for all of us.

What is one thing for Mount Maunganui people your party would do in the first 100 days of Government, and how would you achieve this?

We’ve done a lot in this Government in regards to changing the RMA [Resource Management Act], the planning laws that have held us back and made things so expensive. We’ve changed the RMA into the Planning [and] Natural Environment Bills and now acts of Parliament, but the work needs to be done to make those take effect with the national standards and the way we can comply and achieve with those standards. So that’s a high priority. Part of the problem with the RMA in the 90s was that work wasn’t done, and so high priority for Act is getting that work done to make it simpler and easier for everybody to be able to produce and achieve for themselves and their families.

What two policies would make the most difference to people in your electorate and why?

Well, accountability is incredibly important. So we have seen across the country, not just in Tauranga or in Wellington, but a lot of people saying who can I hold to account for this? One of the examples is we’ve got 28 ministers, 42 government ministry departments and the spaghetti connection between the two is quite horrific. You’ve got some ministries with 17 ministers in charge of it, so nobody’s in charge. And you’ve got ministers with multiple portfolios that they can’t really be across everything ... Act says we need to have 18 ministers, reduce the size of the ministry, reduce the ministries so that no minister has more than one or two ministries and then allow the ministers to appoint, hire and fire the CEOs. Shockingly, that doesn’t happen in New Zealand. We go through a thing called [the] Public Service Commission and that cultural unaccountability flows through our entire system, I believe. So if we can see that the politicians who get elected and become ministers are actually accountable for their departments, we can really hold those ministers to account. In the same way those ministers can get action out of the ministry.

So another one is in the health space. We’ve got these ED [Emergency Department] waiting times that are, we’ve set targets and we’ve reduced those, same with time for first cancer treatments, childhood immunisations, but we’ve still got a huge pressure on our health system. We think we can open up the potential of community pharmacies to deal with small ailments, prescriptions, renewals, skin irritations, other minor ailments that will free up GP time. We also think we should be funding GPs better, that has been neglected and the EDs of New Zealand are full of people who should have seen their GP four weeks ago. If we can free up GP time, that’ll free up the entire system a lot more. We want to see 400 million dollars going to GPs so they can hire a new clerk/secretary to help with the paperwork, keep a GP who otherwise might not leave, pay them a little bit more so they can deal with that. We need to have more GPs and also pharmaceuticals.

The OECD average on pharmaceutical spending is 13%, Australia spends 12% but in New Zealand we spend 5% of our health spend on pharmaceuticals. These are the things that can keep people away from needing a major surgery or something more serious in our hospitals and using our ward space. Act says we should increase the spend on pharmaceuticals as a percentage of the Budget by 1% a year until we match Australia.

You are stranded on a desert island and can only bring one luxury item – something not vital for survival. What do you pick and why?

Books. How many books can I have? I have a few favourites: Pride and Prejudice ... Wild Pork and Watercress ...

Bijou Johnson is a multimedia journalist based in Bay of Plenty. A passionate writer and reader, she grew up in Tauranga and developed a love for journalism while exploring various disciplines at university. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Classical Studies from Massey University.