Simon Wilson: Time’s running out for Labour leader Chris Hipkins

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THREE KEY FACTS
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.
OPINION

What the hell, Chippy? Do you want to win the next election or not? Enough with
the introspective fretting for you and your party, it’s time to step up or step aside. The people who don’t like this Government deserve better. The people who do like it deserve, for a well-functioning democracy, a strong Opposition.

Next year it will be 50 years since we last had a one-term Government.
It was 1972-1975: the glory days of Norman Kirk and then, after Kirk’s tragic death in office, the sad decline under Bill Rowling. The 16 elections since then have led some people – including, it seems, the entire Labour Party – to conclude it’s not possible to defeat an incumbent Government after a single term.
What bollocks. In 1978, Labour won 10,000 more votes than National but lost the election only because of the rules of first-past-the-post.
Labour came even closer in 1993, after one term of the ruinous economic policies of National’s Finance Minister Ruth Richardson. A mere 586 votes across three marginal seats prevented the Government from falling.
And don’t forget the Labour-led Government in 2017-2020 could have served a single term, if Covid hadn’t changed everything.
We were first-time voters in our flat during that 1975 election and we had a big party. Most people crowded into the lounge for an increasingly miserable evening, while Sara and Prue stayed in the pokey little kitchen out the back and drank champagne.
Well, you were allowed to call anything with bubbles “champagne” back then, provided it wasn’t Marque Vue. Sara and Prue definitely did not drink Marque Vue.
National was ruthless after its loss in 1972, replacing “Gentleman Jack” Marshall as leader with a streetfighter possessed of a consuming belief not only that he would win, but that he deserved to win.
Sir Robert Muldoon. Self-belief poured out of him. Rowling, on the other hand, was a nice guy.
Muldoon, like Donald Trump in 2016, modelled the bully’s way to win. But it’s not a good way and it’s not even a guarantee of success, as Trump discovered in 2020 and is discovering again this year.
Utter confidence was Muldoon’s real superpower. Christopher Luxon knows it today. So did Dame Jacinda Ardern in 2017 and 2020, and so does Kamala Harris in America.
Harris runs her campaign as an excitement machine. Like Ardern, like Barack Obama in 2008, she models a different kind of belief: optimism, a sense of purpose, hope.
Why isn’t Chris Hipkins – good ol’ Chippy – doing that?
Another thing about 1975: Muldoon reinvented how to use the media. He looked directly into the camera, which no one had done before, and he sneered at his opponents when he did it. Luxon’s TikTok and Insta reels are the equivalent today.
Does Labour have its own compelling socials strategy?
This is urgent. Let’s just remember what’s going on in this country right now.
Horror stories emerge every week from the health system, but while rising healthcare costs are hard for any Government to manage, the current response beggars belief.
They’ve made tobacco easier to buy, police will attend fewer family harm callouts, social housing construction has been stalled, speed limits are rising, there’ll be no tax on sugar or any other restraints on junk food, benefits are harder to get and primary healthcare and mental healthcare are seriously underfunded.
All these things will raise demand for the most expensive kind of health services: hospital care. Although as the people of Dunedin and Nelson know, hospitals themselves may not be built.
A few new roads, according to Te Waihanga, the Infrastructure Commission, will consume all the money available for infrastructure. Not just in transport but “hospitals, schools, defence, justice, public admin, etc”.
Stopping Kāinga Ora’s construction programme will not only keep more people out of a decent home, it has collapsed the residential construction industry.
With a few exceptions, an entire productive sector has become collateral damage to the ideological pursuit of enriching private landlords. Who have also been given a $2.9 billion tax break.
Climate action is being rolled back in agriculture, energy, urban planning, transport, crisis resilience and more. The damage this causes will extend to trade, because it’s not what our trading partners and competitors are doing.
Fair pay and other worker safeguards are being abandoned, which locks us even more tightly into a low-wage economy. The Government has not reduced crime as promised, but its prison strategy will require expensive new builds. Gun controls are being loosened.
There’s a multi-pronged attack on the economic, cultural and social wellbeing of Māori. In the latest example, funds for training te reo teachers have been reallocated to maths. Neither of them is a nice-to-have and both should be funded properly.
There are cuts and funding confusion in the beneficiary support sector. This includes what looks like gratuitous malice in the approach to disabled care.
Cuts to conservation funding will hasten the extinction of species, already at world-leading levels, increase the spread of invasive flora and fauna and put at further risk the natural world on which our economy so heavily relies.
Universities and polytechs are in crisis, funding for tech innovation is low and ministerial science adviser roles have been unfilled or disestablished altogether.
There’s no plan for Auckland, despite it being an underperforming engine of the economy, home to a third of the population and the new home of most immigrants.
None of this is helping the economy, which is the supposed aim. And people know it. A record 80,174 citizens left New Zealand in the year to June. Three-quarters of them were under age 35.
A business leader spoke out last week. Antonia Watson, CEO of ANZ Bank, suggested a capital gains tax wouldn’t be a bad idea.
The PM and the Finance Minister treated her comments as if she’d said we should all start eating our pets.
Why was that? Did Luxon and Nicola Willis know straight away that Watson was the little kid calling out the emperor’s new clothes? Let a business leader get away with that and who knows where it might end.
Another to speak up last week was the chief economic adviser at the Treasury, Dominick Stephens. He warned that the only way public debt will be back in surplus by 2028, as the Government wants, will be with spending cuts “unprecedented in recent history”.
That includes the 1991 “Mother of All Budgets” that took National to within 586 votes of losing the 1993 election.
But while debt is 39.3% of GDP and headed for 43.5% next year, these numbers are low by OECD standards. No one argues against a rigorous approach to all spending, but we do have more fiscal headroom than the panic merchants suggest.
There are better ways to manage the economy than we are seeing right now, so why isn’t Labour making the most of it?
Hipkins went to Liverpool last week to “learn” from the conference of the successful British Labour Party. Learn what, exactly?
Keir Starmer’s Labour promised little better than the Tory austerity that has wrecked Britain, and for this timidity he won half a million fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn did in 2019.
Starmer’s victory was declared a “landslide” only because Nigel Farage’s Reform UK took 45% of the right-wing vote off the Tories, while first-past-the-post wildly distorted the result. Labour has two-thirds of the MPs, despite winning only a third of the votes.
Whatever lessons there were for Starmer, they do not apply to the far more democratic electoral system we enjoy.
Or perhaps the lesson is that to win an election, all you have to do is wait. Is that Hipkins’ plan? In Britain, it took 14 long years.
Labour remains unpopular here because the electorate lost faith in it and has not found a good reason to get it back. After six years in government, Labour became the party that did not know how to get things done.
Luxon knows this: he never stops talking about how his Government “gets things done”.
Can Hipkins make a difference? He’s the surviving leader of the team that couldn’t.
Is he the leader they need, with fire in his belly and a gleam of hope in his eye? If he is, let’s see it.
Or is he the Bill Rowling of today? Nice guy, good but not good enough.
Labour doesn’t need that. Nor does it need to wait for a leader who’s already proved they can do it. Ardern hadn’t done that before she got the job; nor had Harris. Nor had Luxon. But they do need someone who can build an excitement machine.
Because whatever you think of him, Luxon knows how to do that, too.
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