Christopher Luxon has called Labour leader Chris Hipkins a "champion debater" while trying to lower expectations ahead of the upcoming leaders' debate.
The National leader was out on the campaign trail on Wednesday when he was asked if he was nervous about his first debate against Hipkins.
"I am excited about it, you know Chris Hipkins is a 20-year career politician, he's a champion debater, probably the best debater in our Parliament," Luxon said.
He said he hasn't "even done a debate before", adding he loses "a lot to my wife so I have to say to you I am really looking forward to it and it will be fun".
But he took a dig at his political opponent saying what the country needs is "not a great debater it needs a great manager".
"I always back myself and I will have a lot of fun," he added.
But Hipkins took his own shot at Luxon while talking to media in Dunedin on Wednesday.
"I see that he has also described himself as one of the country's best managers, or inherently seemed to describe himself as one of the country's best managers," Hipkins said. "Most managers know how to make their numbers add up, he seems to be having a lot of difficulty with that."
He said the pair are going into the debate on "relatively even terms".
"He's actually been in his job longer than I have been in mine and we’re both doing it for the first time.
"I think leadership debates are a good opportunity for us to air our competing visions and to have our ideas tested," Hipkins added.
Luxon will face Hipkins in the first leaders' debate on September 19. It comes after the latest Newshub-Reid Research poll had disastrous results for Labour and Hipkins.
The poll revealed on Monday showed support for Labour had dropped significantly, down 5.5 points to 26.8 percent.
On the other side, National will be happy after it improved 4.3 points to 40.9 percent, while ACT fell 2 points to 10.1 percent.
It means a coalition of National and ACT would comfortably form a government based on Newshub's poll result, getting 66 seats. A coalition of Labour/Greens/Te Pāti Māori are well short of the 61 seats needed to win, only getting 50.
But the catastrophic poll results haven't put Hipkins off who took responsibility for the dire numbers on Tuesday and vowed to fight his way back.
"Clearly the polls are not where we want them to be and I accept responsibility for that. I am the leader of the Labour Party and I have a job now to turn those numbers around in the next five weeks as we are out and about on the campaign trail," Hipkins told AM's Ryan Bridge.
"We want to see those numbers going up. I acknowledge a lot of that support that is flowing back to National is actually coming from ACT rather than our side of the political aisle but Labour's numbers are not where I want them to be. They're not where we need to be to win, so we need to work really hard to get them back up again."
It comes despite Labour announcing major policies that have failed to lift their results, which are at levels not seen since Andrew Little was leader.
When asked what Labour will do differently, Hipkins said Labour's campaign is just starting compared to other parties who've been campaigning for months.
"We were a bit later getting into the campaign. We've had some big challenges as a government that we've been dealing with and now we're on the campaign trail, a bit unshackled from that," he said.
"I've got that opportunity to get out there and talk about the things I want to do, my vision for the country and yes, we are going to be talking about the risk of a change of government."
Hipkins stayed true to his line about the coalition involving National, ACT and New Zealand First as one of "chaos and cuts" that "simply can't make the numbers add up".
