Prime Minister elect Christopher Luxon said National and New Zealand First's teams have spoken – but he doesn't want to carry out coalition negotiations through the media.
Luxon told Breakfast this morning: "It feels like the end of a long job interview, to be honest."
Asked if he'd spoken to NZ First leader Winston Peters since the election, Luxon said: "Look, our teams have spoken.
"I'm not going to go into that because, in fairness, as I said on the night, I want to work respectfully with each of the political parties that are involved. We're gonna form a strong, stable government, that's really important."
And the National leader said the party's strategy is now focused on three things.
"The first is that there's 570,000 special votes that still need to be counted," he said. "That'll take up to November 3 before we have complete clarity on the election result."
There are "a lot of dynamics at play" with the special votes, he added.
"The second thing is that we do want to use the three weeks to actually progress the relationship and start conversations around arrangements with respective parties," Luxon said.
"I'm not going to do that as per normal – as I've observed in recent elections in New Zealand – where it's very much a blow-by-blow, done through the media. We're gonna do that privately.
"And then thirdly, there's a bunch of work around the transition and just making sure that we have a very smooth transition.
"Chris Hipkins and the Labour government outgoing have been very good at also reaching out already, and our teams are in close concert around actually things that are in between two governments, really, that we need to be consulted on."
SHARE ME