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"New Zealand is a wet, whiny, negative, inward-looking country."

It is almost certainly the quote of the week, unless the next couple of days are out of the box.

I would suggest the Massey University people have, hopefully, lined it up as a contender for the quote of the year.

In fact, this might well be some sort of turning point for Chris Luxon and his apparent battle with getting traction in the polls.

Here is the thing - I don\\u2019t actually think he has a poll problem, mainly because the polls are not reflecting what\'s going on in the country.

What makes his line so funny is its really only news because the media happened to be there when he said it. You don\\u2019t think he\'s said it before?

You don\\u2019t think that every meeting he goes to, they aren\'t saying it to him and he\'s not saying it to them?

I am bombarded with the sentiment literally every day and I am out and about nowhere near as much as he is.

As we told you the other day, he is packing out halls up and down this country. In Taranaki the other day, their hall holds 100 people and they packed 200 in, with another 200 still waiting outside.

This is the story of this campaign. Real New Zealand is out and interested and Luxon is out and meeting them. What you heard in Helensville is repeated, and applauded, almost daily up and down this land.

The fact the media seemed to think this had "raised a few eyebrows" shows you just how out of touch the media is.

This country is in rotten shape. It\'s in rotten shape by virtually any metric. Look at the economy, crime, health or education. Pick your problem because it\'s there and it\\u2019s a mess.

What Luxon articulates, and the reason it has traction, is that it wasn\\u2019t so long ago we were actually not wet and not inward-looking. We were successful and aspirational.

That\\u2019s been smashed to pieces in six short years. As I have said a number of times, since David Lange I have not seen a more disparate, desperate, sad and angsty country in my lifetime.

The Government has taken a robust, independent country and, through a combination of fear-based policy, economic incompetence and ideological nonsense, wreaked havoc.

Luxon uses the words wet, whiny and inward-looking. I could use many more.

The point is, he\'s right. The bigger point is, a lot of people agree with him. \\xa0 \\xa0

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