Hipkins: ‘We were swimming upstream the whole way through the year’

When Chris Hipkins put his hand up for Prime Minister and Labour leader in January, he said he knew then the pathway to victory was a “very narrow one”.

“I knew it would involve a lot of things going right for us, and many of those things didn’t go right for us.

“I was always realistic and if I was being completely selfish and sort of thinking about my own political future, the best thing for me would have been not to put my hand up to be Prime Minister when Jacinda resigned, because at that point we were already polling in the high 20s.”

Hipkins accepts the criticism he wasn’t himself in the first few weeks of the campaign and puts that down to a few things.

“It was a tough year and the adjustment from being a minister to being Prime Minister was a big one, and I didn’t get long to make that adjustment.

“We dealt with some tough stuff right as the campaign was starting and that wasn’t easy, particularly some of the personnel issues. I don’t want to get into those again because I don’t think it’s fair for some of those involved … but it was bloody hard to go through all of that and then hit the campaign trail straight away,” he recalls.

There was also the criticism that the public didn’t know what Labour stood for after a series of policy bonfires and then a new policy programme that never really got traction.

“The first half of that I absolutely stand by, which was to make space for the second part, which for a variety of reasons we never quite managed to shape.

“The idea of creating space is that you need to have something to fill the space but because of a whole series of events that were beyond my control we didn’t get to fill that space.

“If you look at some of the policies we announced during the campaign … in many cases they were overshadowed by other things that were going on, so the public never heard them.”

Hipkins maintains Labour’s climate change manifesto was more progressive than even the Green Party’s but “no one heard it because there was too much other noise going on at the time”.

By the time of the campaign, Labour was already seen to be losing.

Instead of policies being perceived as “in touch with the public”, which he says is the case when you’re ahead, they were instead seen as “desperation”.

He believes much of Labour’s cost of living 10-point plan fell victim to that (certainly free dental for under-30s and GST off fresh and frozen fruit and vegetables largely ended up being viewed in that light).

Hipkins also thinks the election wasn’t particularly policy driven.

“I think it was a sentiment-driven election and I think the sentiment was one for change. I don’t think people were really weighing up the policy offerings of Labour and National, particularly, they were weighing up the vibe of, do I want Labour back, or do I want something different?”

With all that said, Hipkins says if he didn’t think there was a chance of winning, he wouldn’t have put his hand up, but as the year went on it became more of an uphill battle.

“We had been the sensible, responsible, stable government and then through the course of the year we well and truly lost the ability to claim that.”

Looking back, Hipkins says the writing was on the wall even before this campaign.

“On election night in 2020 as everyone was celebrating and enjoying it, I was less buoyant than many of my colleagues,” he tells Newsroom.

Labour won a single-party majority in 2020 – history-making in the MMP era – and though it went on to form a supply and confidence governing arrangement with the Greens, it had a clear mandate.

‘If I had felt like I was responsible for the defeat, of course I would have resigned, but I didn’t feel I was’

Hipkins was in his Remutaka electorate eating his traditional fish and chips dinner and was bothered by two things.

The first was a phone call from then-Director of Health Ashley Bloomfield saying a new Covid case had been detected through surveillance and the contact tracing was underway.

But the second was more a sense of what was to come.

“I could not see an exit route for us from the elimination strategy,” Hipkins remembers.

“Moving from elimination where the border was effectively closed, barring a couple of thousand people a fortnight coming through MIQ, to one where we had the border open and Covid was in the community – that was never going to be a smooth-sailing process.

“It was always going to be a bit of a storm, and that’s what it was. So, for Auckland, I think, one of the things that was really challenging for us in that last period from August through to December of 2021 was we moved from elimination to containment to managing Covid within the community all within a short space of time,” he said.

“For Aucklanders, who we were asking to adopt what felt like an elimination strategy for that period of time when they had started to realise elimination was no longer possible, it became a harder message to communicate.

“We perhaps didn’t paint the pathway forward and why we were asking them to do that as clearly as we needed to.”

What transpired was an absolute drubbing in Auckland for Labour including the loss of the safe seats of New Lynn and Mt Roskill to National, and only narrowly holding on to Mt Albert and Te Atatū.

From PM to Opposition leader

By the time election night rolled around, Hipkins had already made his mind up about his own future.

“If I had felt like I was responsible for the defeat, of course I would have resigned, but I didn’t feel I was.

“To a large extent I kind of felt like the die had already been cast before I even became the Prime Minister, and we were swimming upstream the whole way through the year.”

Hipkins says he isn’t done with politics, and he has three things on his agenda as Opposition leader.

First is to mould the team into good Opposition MPs given many of them have only ever known government, the second is to redefine Labour, and third he says the party needs to reconnect with and rebuild its supporter base.

Both Labour and National have severely derailed in Opposition and gone through a string of leaders in a very public and messy way post-government but Hipkins is adamant that won’t happen this time.

“I think some of the preconditions for that is having people with fundamental policy differences in your team, and we don’t really have that. There are some issues around tax that we’ll work through but it’s not fundamental – people might have a different view on wealth tax and a capital gains tax, but these aren’t major fundamental philosophical differences in approach.

“Then you also have to have burning ambition, people who are just wiling to claw each other’s eyes out, and we don’t have that either.”

Though several senior MPs in the caucus have indicated they’ll stay on for now, Hipkins expects some will reassess over Christmas and decide they’re ready to go.

But for him there’s still unfinished business.

“I’d like to have another go at being Prime Minister and I would like to go into that next time around starting with my priorities and focus and agenda.”

He says new things drive him in politics now than when he first came to Parliament and spent nine years in Opposition.

“I’m less focused on the political game than I used to be … I’m a lot more philosophical about democracy than I used to be.

“The tide comes in and goes out, that’s just the nature of things and it’s what you do in-between that matters,” he says.

So, what next for his political story?

“Well, Keith Holyoake lost the first election he contested as Prime Minister and went on to win four in a row, so you never know what might be possible.”