In a very obliging and helpful gesture Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who had invited several of his other pals for a visit, had asked Mr Luxon if he might like to pop over the Ditch and meet them.
This was a terrific opportunity for Mr Luxon personally and New Zealand in general. The Prime Minister famously missed the Apec summit last year as the talks to confirm the various coalition agreements were incomplete and it is difficult to represent a government which you have not actually formed yet.
The Melbourne meeting, a special summit organised in recognition of 50 years of relations between Australia and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, was a chance for Mr Luxon to put that miss to rights, and to engage in some personal diplomacy with regional leaders with whom he has not yet had the chance to shake hands.
The presidents of the Philippines and Indonesia, and the prime ministers of Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand were among the leaders Mr Luxon was meant to meet, nations which quite apart from their strategic importance in our hemisphere also represent a decent slice of New Zealand’s overseas trade.
This would represent important face time ... but only if Mr Luxon could actually get there.
The Prime Minister was scheduled to fly over on the defence force’s Boeing 757 aircraft, a vehicle which is seemingly preordained to break down whenever the leader of the country wants to use it.
Just as Cabinet is starting to make final decisions about Budget spending, including defence spending, the 757 made its own substantial contribution about the importance of modern, effective military equipment and the perils of deferring replacement of outdated machinery.
Those Budget negotiations already promised to be fascinating due to the potential clash between Finance Minister Nicola Willis’ request that all sectors of government find savings and Act New Zealand’s commitment to increasing the amount of defence spending as a percentage of GDP.
Mr Luxon, having to fly via Auckland to Melbourne due to the lack of a suitable direct flight, may well have spent his time on the way contemplating the 757 question, let alone landing rights agreements, airport operational hours and international airline access to the capital.
The 54th Parliament spent most of last week sitting under urgency, and will do so again this week ... as it has done several other times in its brief existence.
Collins Dictionary defines urgency as a need for action or haste due to stress, pressure, or necessity.
Parliament has no such neat definition, although convention dictates that it should only be accorded sparingly. Parliamentary Practice in New Zealand 2023 offers the examples of legal issues or emergency situations as not unreasonable uses of urgency.
Political situations, such as when a government wishes to implement campaign pledges or pass Budget legislation quickly, are other potential uses, although the text notes that there is a potential risk of a government looking bad if it does too much under urgency, without the usual parliamentary scrutiny.
In other words, you might be excused once for, say, speeding to the airport to make a flight, but do it every time you try to catch a plane and someone will most likely complain.
Ultimately, the voters get to decide if the coalition has taken too liberal a definition of "urgency" in its PR-created drive to tick off its first 100-day agenda within its own arbitrary and self-imposed timeline.
But that will not be for another three years, and the government will be counting on the public having forgotten about any unease they might have felt about the haste with which it has unravelled the previous government’s work.
The voters might also have forgotten about the cost of the brand-new plane that the government may or may not have bought for itself in the interim.
But that would likely depend if it was deemed to be a matter of urgency, or not.
