Senior National minister Chris Bishop has confirmed the party’s caucus will meet by Zoom tonight and says he has not spoken to any of his colleagues about replacing Christopher Luxon as leader.

The meeting was scheduled in the ordinary course of business and the caucus normally met three weeks out of four when Parliament was sitting, he said.

Members had wanted to meet during the recess week because the election was drawing closer.

“It’s not an emergency caucus meeting. It is a regular caucus meeting in a recess week,” Bishop said.

Asked whether the leadership would be on the agenda, he said caucus discussions were not something he would talk about, but the answer was no. He also declined to say what time the meeting was being held.

“There’s six hours between six and midnight. I can tell you for free, it’s not at midnight,” he said.

Bishop was speaking to media in Auckland, where he was opening the Te Mahia pedestrian overpass, with the opening of Westgate Station also scheduled for later in the day.

He was asked repeatedly about reports of leadership manoeuvring inside the National caucus and said he did not intend to comment on media stories.

Asked directly whether he had full confidence in Luxon, Bishop said yes. He said he had not had any conversations with Education Minister Erica Stanford about a leadership challenge, and had not spoken to any colleagues about a change.

Bishop said he talked to caucus colleagues constantly and that Monday had been a Cabinet day, so there had been conversations between ministers and MPs, which he described as part and parcel of daily life for an MP.

A reporter put to him that a confidence vote in Luxon had gone 27 to 22 in the Prime Minister’s favour. Bishop said he did not know where that reporting had come from, that the caucus vote was secret, and that only two or three people in the country knew the result.

He said it was not worth speculating on something known to so few people. Bishop’s own name has been raised as a potential leader.

“You’d have to ask your own typewriters that, because you’re the ones who keep writing the stories,” he said.

His focus was on delivering the government’s agenda across his portfolios, he said. Bishop was critical of colleagues speaking to media anonymously about the leadership, saying it was unhelpful and not what caucus members should be doing.

“I would say to them, don’t do it,” he said. Asked whether the briefings signalled discontent within National, he said it indicated a couple of people who were prepared to talk to media were unhappy.

On the events of recent weeks, Bishop said Luxon had apologised last week for remarks he made, and there had been debate about the party’s position on an MMP referendum, which National would take to the election. The referendum would not be the focus of the campaign, he said.

Bishop said National would campaign on Labour’s tax policy, including its plan to scrap the investment boost scheme, which he said officials had advised was one of the single best things the government could do for productivity.

He said Labour finance spokesperson Barbara Edmonds had described the policy as a good thing at the time of the Budget. Bishop said he was optimistic about the government’s future and pointed to fiscal discipline, law and order and education standards as areas where it had made progress over the past two and a half years.

National would seek a mandate for policies including compulsory KiwiSaver, an increase to paid parental leave, large infrastructure investment and scrapping NCEA, he said.