We know he likes sausage rolls and Diet Coke, but who is the real Chris Hipkins and what life experiences have shaped the man they call Chippy? In the first of two in-depth profiles on the leaders of our biggest political parties ahead of this year’s election, senior political correspondent Audrey Young talks to the Prime Minister - and his mum.
Christopher Luxon: The full story of the man who wants to be PM
Chris Hipkins is about to face pressure he has never known before.
In October, at the age of 45, he will be attempting to keep his party in power for a third term after only nine months as Prime Minister.
It is a feat that proved too much for many other Prime Ministers who took the reins mid-term such as Jack Marshall, Bill Rowling, Mike Moore, Jenny Shipley and Bill English.
And a succession of problems with recalcitrant ministers have undermined Labour’s chances.
But the woman who knows him best in life says he is more than up to it, and Hipkins himself is relishing the chance to differentiate himself.
“So much of what we’re doing at the moment is stuff that was already in train when I became the Prime Minister,” Hipkins says in an interview in his Beehive boardroom.
“The election campaign is an opportunity for me to kind of put my own stamp on things and say ‘these are the priorities I want to work on in the next three years.’”
“He will handle it,” says Rosemary Hipkins. “He won’t buckle.”
Rose, as she is more often called, is the Prime Minister’s mother. She and Chris’ father, Doug, live in Raumati South, about 50km north of Wellington.
They are a hugely important part of their son’s life, and even more so as he juggles leadership with being a father to a 7-year-old son, Charlie, and 4-year-old daughter, Isabel.
Her son is overseas and she is sitting under a painting of a young boy on a beach - it is a young Chris Hipkins.
“I think he’ll cope with it very well because he is disciplined, because he can focus on what matters,” she said.
“He doesn’t sweat the small stuff. He doesn’t bear grudges. He just moves on, accepts how things are and does the best he can in whatever circumstances confront him and that’s what he will keep doing.”
While Hipkins brands himself simply as “a boy from the Hutt” Rose Hipkins reveals more about her son’s character than his penchant for sausage rolls and mince pies and suggests he was not a typical boy.
“Chris was always a very singular boy. He marched to his own drum right from the time he was little.
“You know sometimes you look at little babies and people will say something like ‘oh you’ve been here before,’ people said that to Chris. Just a quiet interest in the world and something going on. I don’t even know how to describe it really.
“He was curious about the world and how it worked.”
After a school trip to a movie theatre, he had become fascinated with the history of picture theatre ownership in New Zealand and completed a meticulously detailed project on it for social studies.
“He really wanted to know what made things tick. He was quite different to other children … He wasn’t a typical Kiwi child at all.”
But then Rose was not a typical Kiwi mum either.
Dr Rosemary Hipkins (BSc (Hons), Master of Education, PhD) talks not just as a mother but as a former teacher, a highly qualified educationist and one of three chief researchers at the New Zealand Council for Educational Research. She is still working two days a week at the age of 75.
She spent lockdown working on her most recent book Teaching for Complex Systems Thinking, and was a guest speaker at the PPTA conference earlier this year. She was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to science education in 2019.
Chris Hipkins paid tribute to his parents in his speech to the Labour Congress in June, and their hard work raising him and his older brother, Dave, in Waterloo, in the eastern suburbs of Hutt Valley. His father was the first to volunteer for school trips and later became chairman of the board of trustees at Hutt Valley Memorial College.
Shelves, gardens and retaining walls
Hipkins is an avid gardener and handyman and learned a lot of his skills from his father. Doug worked at the DIC department store in Lambton Quay before it went broke. He then managed a Nees Mitre 10 Homecentre, and went on to become a self-employed maintenance contractor.
For Chris, that love of building continued through adulthood. He doesn’t listen to music to help him unwind; his happy place is making things, shelves, gardens, retaining walls, especially retaining walls. The biggest project he has had to date was a landscape gardening project at his own beach house in Raumati, not far from his parents’ place.
He finds a photo of the retaining walls on his phone, all done by hand one summer.
“I get a huge amount of satisfaction from being able to stand back and look at it and say ‘I built that,’” he told the Herald.
“I find that very relaxing. It’s good hard physical kind of labour.”
When he bought his first house, in Upper Hutt, he built the shelving with MDF packing sheets.
One friend said Hipkins had the reputation of having the best election hoardings in the country. He accepts the compliment and says his father helped him to perfect the design, which is now done by volunteers.
“We use roofing screws rather than nails because roofing screws don’t bend. If people try to push them over or smash them up, they don’t bend whereas if you use steel nails they bend and then you’re spending forever pulling nails out,” says Hipkins.
At the beach in Taranaki
That streak of industrious pursuit has been evident in both sides of Hipkins’ family.
Rose (nee Whittaker) came from Waitara in Taranaki, where her mother was a teacher and her father and uncle ran the timber mill. And many childhood holidays were spent in a family-built bach near the mouth of the Mimi River, about 30km away.
His great-grandfather had built the bach on private farmland near an urupā. You could get to it only at low tide, with each family member hauling stuff along the beach to bed-in for the holiday.
“The farmers liked him because he would go and shoot the rabbits,” says Hipkins. “The iwi liked him because he would keep vandals away from the urupā.
“It was made of car-packing cases and driftwood and the water was basically whatever was collected into a big tank out the back.”
There was no electricity. There was a long-drop toilet out the back that every couple of years his uncles would come and re-dig. It expanded as more lean-tos were added to the basic bach and when extended family arrived, an old circus-top tent would be set up in the paddock to house the overflow.
“These days you wouldn’t get baches like that,” says Hipkins.
The painting of the boy on the beach was from one of the holidays up there and was painted from a photograph by an aunt, Margaret Whittaker.
But the Taranaki beach holidays ended after both his grandfathers died in 1986, coincidentally about six weeks apart.
In 1987, when Hipkins turned 9, his parents bought a beach house at Raumati South, closer to their home in the Hutt Valley and most holidays were spent there. Hipkins later bought that house from his parents for his own beach house.
References to it were memorialised in social media memes just before New Year in 2021 when Hipkins, by then Covid-19 Response Minister, walked out of the bushes in a white shirt and tie for a press conference to talk about the arrival of Omicron.
When he was finished, he gave his little kids a big hug.
Hipkins and former partner British-born Jade Paul got together when Hipkins was a backbench MP and married in 2019 after they had had two children. Jacinda Ardern agreed to let them use Premier House for the wedding. Finance Minister Grant Robertson was best man and former MP Darren Hughes was groomsman.
Hipkins made it clear just before being sworn in as Prime Minister in January this year that Jade and the kids were strictly out of bounds and that he would not talk about their split last year.
“We remain incredibly close,” he said at a press conference. “She’s still my best friend. But we have made that decision in the best interest of our family,” he said.
He wanted his kids to grow up as typical Kiwi kids.
“I want them to be able to make mistakes. I want them to be able to learn and to grow, without five million people looking over their shoulder.
“You won’t see pictures of them, you know, on social media or in the media and so on, and I simply asked New Zealanders to respect that as well.”
The self-contained ‘man alone’
Hipkins became Prime Minister in January this year when Ardern resigned – although she and deputy Robertson had alerted Hipkins to the possibility before the Christmas break, so he could think about stepping up.
It has been a remarkable turn of events for someone whose political selling point appears to be how unremarkable he is – hence the endless references to sausage rolls and pies.
As second reserve, Hipkins is the least anticipated of any Prime Minister in recent memory, and yet the most obvious pick, after Robertson flagged it away.
He was not charismatic like Ardern but not polarising either, in control but not controlling, intelligent but not intellectual, tribal Labour but collegial with it, pragmatic, non-ideological, and known and liked by the public after his role as Covid-19 Response Minister.
By the time of the election, Hipkins will have had almost nine months in the job. It is long enough for him to have demonstrated his own style - sensible, practical, and upfront.
A friend described Hipkins as “Man Alone.” A colleague said he consulted other colleagues about big decisions, as Ardern did, but then he liked to mull it over by himself before deciding, whereas she got among the weeds and consulted and consulted and consulted, sometimes to a fault.
More than one person said it was common for Hipkins to want to “sleep on it” before coming to a decision.
Many friends described him as self-contained. He was at ease in his own skin, confident in his own judgment, with an ability to compartmentalise his life and switch quickly from one thing to another.
Rose concurs with the description of self-contained.
“He is. And just as well for the job he got to do now because if you try jumping to everyone’s tune, you are just going to flounder, aren’t you? The problems facing the world are so complex. A person has got to have a set of values to find their way through them.”
Going to an out-of-zone school
Hipkins spent his childhood growing up in a working-class area of Eastern Hutt.
His parents bought an ex-state house with a large section at the back and a large vegetable garden, which Hipkins loved to tend.
He went to Waterloo Primary School and wanted to be an electrician as a boy.
Hipkins followed his older brother to working-class Petone College (previously Hutt Valley Memorial College) instead of the in-zone, higher decile school Hutt Valley High School, favoured by many parents.
Petone was possibly one of the few co-ed secondary schools that did not have a rugby team. Rugby league, yes, golf, tennis, volleyball, basketball and small bore rifle but no rugby team.
“It was the nature of the blue-collar area,” says Hipkins.
Hipkins himself was not a sporting type but had a special interest in the school’s bunk-style lodge at Pokaka, the Taylor Memorial Lodge. It was established right by Tongariro National Park in honour of teachers Hugh and Alison Taylor, who were killed in a plane crash in Burma in 1978.
Hipkins’ father, who chaired the school board of trustees for much of Chris Hipkins’ time there, helped to take skiing and tramping trips away. As a senior student, Hipkins also helped to administer the trust that ran the lodge. Now called the Taylor Lodge, it is comprised of four joined-up railway houses, and running today under private ownership.
So why did the Hipkins boys attend an out-of-zone school when Hutt Valley High School was more popular?
Rose said it had been clear that Hutt Valley Memorial College was a much more multicultural school.
“I knew that our boys were not going to live in a white world and it is increasingly becoming so much more multicultural and I wanted them to grow up mixing with all different sorts of people, not just with other kids like them so that they wouldn’t be afraid to when they were adults. And boy, that paid off.
“They are happy with all different sorts of people ... they don’t feel threatened by the increasingly bicultural and multicultural society that New Zealand is becoming. And I really think that’s important.”
Coming from Waitara, she had grown up in a town with a large Māori population.
“For me, it was what I was used to and it was what I wanted them to be used to, to respect other people, and see the good in them and not feel threatened by their difference.”
Origins of a strong moral compass
Rose said she and her husband had a strong moral compass, grounded in her own case by the Christian beliefs of her grandparents which had been passed on to her mother. Rose herself attended a Methodist church as a child but gave it up once she studied science and understood human evolution.
She said the moral compass they tried to impart to their sons was a social justice thing.
“I used to say to Dave and Chris it is easy to see who has got more than you; it is much, much harder to see who has got less. I wanted them to understand how privileged they were.
“We weren’t wealthy by any means but you would hardly call us poor. We’ve worked hard for what we’ve got. We haven’t had any of it handed to us on a plate.
“Where we lived in the Hutt there was a grove of state houses just across the road from us and there were refugee families in there and some people with very little to come and go on and I just wanted them to notice and to know.”
Chris had grown up very aware of those things, she said.
In his last year of school, the woman who ran the canteen broke her leg and the school was going to close the canteen until she returned.
“Chris wasn’t having that because he knew that a lot of the kids wouldn’t get food unless they could have the cheap food that the canteen sold.”
So he and a friend, Jody, would go to school early to prepare food and open the canteen at morning teatime, sell the food and go back to class.
Rose said neither she nor her husband were politically active.
“But I think if you have that concern for people who are not as well off as you, probably you have to be inclining to the left.
“Certainly (we were) politically aware, always voted left but not politically active. Chris was the first member of our family to jump in boots and all.”
Hipkins’ first political event with Labour was when he was still a seventh former.
It was election day 1996 and after volunteering he was put to work in Wellington Central, which Labour had big hopes of winning.
The electorate was won by Act’s Richard Prebble and defeat was captured in Hipkins’ eyes that night by the film crew of the documentary Campaign.
Hipkins had his first electoral success at school in 1996. He was elected to serve as the school’s head boy in the seventh form. The end-of-year magazine, the Pitonian, marked him out in the seventh form awards as “most likely to be Prime Minister” which Hipkins believes was the word of head girl, Amy Bradley.
His self-awareness and maturity was evident back then in his the end of year report in the Pitonian: “I have watched [Hutt Valley Memorial College] transform into Petone College … the change has given me many valuable life skills; I have learned that to be strong you need to believe in yourself no matter what others say. You need to develop the ability to ‘switch off’ when your emotions start to overload. But most importantly you need to learn to depend on yourself, as there is no guarantee the other people you depend on will still be there in a year’s time ...”
And his final parting words: “Set yourself goals and work towards them, never lose sight of what you are trying to do and you can make a difference.”
‘The adult among the Maoists’
Hipkins spent the next few years at Victoria University gaining a BA in politics and criminology, and getting more politicised.
He grew his red hair long, he wore bright clothes and often went barefoot.
One of the most defining moments was being arrested in his first year, 1997, in a student protest at Parliament about tertiary education reforms under National. The ensuing court case and parliamentary rulings have relevance today in terms of the rights of citizens to protest at Parliament and when the Speaker should initiate trespass notices.
The charges were dropped but the case for wrongful arrest went on for years and by the time it was settled, Hipkins was a member of Parliament and Lockwood Smith was the Speaker. About 40 former students received an apology from Smith and a payout, thought to be about $5000.
Hipkins was taken to the cells at Wellington police station and was let out about 3am or 4am, with his father dispatched to collect him.
He says it didn’t feel like a defining moment in his life at the time but in retrospect, it was a trigger for a whole series of events that led him to where he is today.
“It was probably the thing that compelled me to get more involved in student politics and that ultimately led me to being more involved in the Labour Party, which led me on to working for Trevor [Mallard], which led me on to standing for Parliament.”
In his first year, he also stood for the student executive, unsuccessfully, but was co-opted onto the exec when an elected member resigned.
He worked on the student newspaper Salient, edited by the Spinoff’s Toby Manhire. Some of Salient’s other worker bees around that time included journalist Melodie Robinson, National MP Tama Potaka, Environment Secretary James Palmer, blogger Malcolm Harbrow, Labour general secretary Rob Salmond, academic Max Rashbrooke, and Liam Hockings who died in the Loafers Lodge fire this year.
The New Zealand Herald’s business investigations reporter Matt Nippert was a contemporary of Hipkins and they served together on the student executive in 1999.
Nippert had certainly not pegged him as a future Prime Minister, thinking maybe he would even be a long-shot to become an MP.
“But what I’d written off as a boring, uncharismatic focus on core issues and administration two decades ago really needs to be revised,” says Nippert.
“I recall him being the preternaturally adult chair in the room during exec meetings filled with volatile Maoists and egotists.
“He was, by contrast, calm, competent and extremely organised and limited his passionate protests to core education issues.
“Cannily, he avoided getting sucked into the interminable factional in-fights and niche causes that come part-and-parcel with campus politics,” Nippert said.
Hipkins went on to stand in 1999 as student president, successfully challenging the incumbent, Hamish Hopkinson, and held the role in 2000 and 2001. Salient reports his previous achievements included getting high chairs for the school cafe, and lockers for students. He also revealed his older taste in music – Simon and Garfunkel and the Beatles – which must have seemed quaint at a time compared with contemporary tastes such as Shihad and Che Fu.
Awash in student politicians
One of the most outstanding features of the current Government is the number of former student politicians in its ranks.
Hipkins points to three examples in National as well - Todd Muller, Erica Stanford and Paula Bennett - and says the skills used in student politics can be valuable in national politics.
“Student politics gives you an amazing set of skills that are quite transferable to national-level politics,” he said.
“You are kind of running small organisations, you are engaged in a lot of cut and thrust of argument, you get to practise your public speaking skills. You do develop your politician instincts in that time so I think people often gravitate from that towards national-level politics.”
Besides Hipkins’ own stint at Victoria University, Health Minister Ayesha Verrall was student president at Otago in 2001.
New minister Rachel Brooking was president at Otago in 1997.
Finance Minister Grant Robertson was in an older cohort. He was president at Otago in 1993 and of NZUSA in 1996.
Among Hipkins’ student executive at Victoria was Fleur Fitzsimons, the Labour candidate for Rongotai, a former Wellington City Councillor and former Women’s vice-president of the Labour Party. She is also the partner of one of Hipkins’ senior advisers, David Choat.
Fitzsimons followed Hipkins as president of VUWSA.
Former Labour leader Andrew Little was VUWSA president in 1987 and went on to become president of the national body NZUSA in 1988 and 1989.
Hipkins’ chief of staff, Andrew Kirton, was president at Lincoln when Hipkins was president of Victoria, then of NZUSA in 2004 with Fleur Fitzsimons. In 2005, Kirton was co-president with Camilla Belich, now his wife, and a first-term Labour list MP.
Hipkins’ chief press secretary, Andrew Campbell, had no difficulty deciding to stay on with Hipkins after Jacinda Ardern quit as Prime Minister because his history with Hipkins goes way back.
Campbell was president at Otago in 2000, when Hipkins was president at Victoria, then went on to become president of NZUSA in Hipkins’ second year as president of Victoria.
Campbell shared that role in 2001 with Sam Huggard, a former vice-president at Auckland University (to Efeso Collins), the former general secretary of the Council of Trade Unions who is now with the NZEI teacher union.
When the NZUSA offices needed renovating, Hipkins arrived one weekend with a jackhammer and his father in tow and got rid of a wall that needed removing.
Road trips and active relaxation
Huggard and Campbell were also very much part of Hipkins’ social circle. Along with Huggard’s partner, Fran Renton, and Ayesha Verrall and Fleur Fitzsimons, they would holiday together, taking road trips invariably organised by Hipkins to destinations such as Gisborne, Tora in the Wairarapa, Dunedin and Alexandra.
Hipkins was known as an “active relaxer,” organising walks and taking his mountain bike to get a few rides in. Trail bike riding has been a passion of Hipkins’ although he has not managed to get in a decent ride since becoming Prime Minister.
Rose says he lived at home while he was studying but left home when he became student president.
She does not recall him ever going through a rebellious phase.
“He was always just busy and full of the things he needed and wanted to do and he was always enterprising.”
She recalled a summer job he had as a student which demonstrated his enterprise.
He had a job with a supermarket to replace the expired bread in racks out the back. But he often had to stand around waiting if the supermarket’s truck driver didn’t turn up to collect and deliver the bread and had to organise another driver.
“So he went and got his articulated licence so he could drive the bread truck himself, said Rose.
“But shortly after that he got his first job and he never really got to use his artic licence. If he sees a practical problem, he thinks of a solution.”
Between his roles in student politics and becoming a political adviser in the Beehive, Hipkins had a brief experience in what could be called the normal workforce. He worked as a policy adviser to the Industry Training Federation - which relates to his special interest in vocational training and apprenticeships. And he moved to New Plymouth to become a training manager for Todd Energy.
Learning from Mallard and Simpson
Hipkins headed to the Beehive to became a political adviser in the middle term of Helen Clark’s Fifth Labour Government. It was at the time he acquired his nickname Chippy – a conflation of Chris Hipkins.
He worked for Trevor Mallard, who had a prodigious capacity for work and a reputation for getting things done.
Hipkins had previously met Mallard over the possible closure of Petone College but did not know him well (the school closed under National’s watch in 1999, which Hipkins supported by then because its roll had dropped to not much more than 150).
Mallard, who went on to become a controversial Speaker and is now serving as ambassador to Ireland, taught the apprentice some valuable lessons.
“One of the most important things I learned from Trevor that I’ve carried with me for the entire time I’ve been a minister is that not making a decision is the worst decision you can make,” said Hipkins.
“It’s the equivalent of making a decision and it is usually the worst of all options.
“You are there to make decisions and if you don’t make decisions then you are actually not doing the job that you’re there to do. So you assemble all the facts, you make sure you are informed and then you make decisions.
“It has served me exceptionally well because I think the people who get into trouble in this place are often the people who don’t make decisions.”
The other thing he learned from that time was what to do about mistakes.
“You need to just own that when you do. If you make a decision and it doesn’t pan out the way you intended, you pivot, you move on and you make a different decision.”
Mallard’s portfolios in the three years Hipkins worked for him included Education, State Services, Sports and Associate Finance.
Hipkins was among those advising Mallard he needed to cease his programme of school closures. While it was the logical move in many areas with small rolls, it was damaging the Government too much to continue.
The job of being a ministerial adviser is to be across your minister’s portfolios, to be aware and warn of any pitfalls that might emerge in policy proposals and to be willing to give a minister advice they might not like. It is also to liaise with the Prime Minister’s Office.
Top of the tree was Clark’s chief of staff, Heather Simpson, or H2 as she was known. On Friday morning, she would assemble all the ministerial advisers in the ministerial meeting room on the eighth floor of the Beehive. The object was to review the previous week, make an example of the errors, and look ahead to the coming week.
Hipkins was considered by his peers to be organised, always well-briefed and not intimidated by Simpson as many were. He is said to have been switched on to the politics of an issue and to middle New Zealand but perhaps to have been more driven by politics than policy.
MPs love being called conviction politicians. It makes them sound highly principled. So is Hipkins offended by being described as a moderate, a centrist and someone who is decidedly not a conviction politician?
No, he says, but he prefers another description - an incremental radical – someone who does not ascribe to quick change.
“I just think if you want to make change, and you want it to stick, then ‘big bang’ doesn’t give you change that sticks.”
In fact, he said, it created a huge amount of turmoil that could often undo the intention of what you’re trying to do.
“If you want to make big enduring change, you have to bring people with you and there’s only so much capacity people have to absorb change.”
Labour’s bright young things
Hipkins was part of a cohort of bright young things in the Beehive at that time who would come to produce the next generation of party leadership.
Grant Robertson was very much the senior member of the group and was promoted from being Marian Hobbs’ political adviser to working in Helen Clark’s office, reporting directly to Heather Simpson.
Jacinda Ardern was part of the young crew too, having worked for Harry Duynhoven and Phil Goff before joining Clark’s political advisory team.
Among the others in Hipkins’ cohort were Luke McMahon, a justice specialist who worked for Goff and now works for Corrections; David Choat, an education specialist who worked for Steve Maharey when he was responsible for tertiary education and is on Hipkins’ current staff; Marcus Ganley, a former select committee staff member who worked for John Tamihere and Michael Cullen; and James Caygill, who worked for Margaret Wilson and Pete Hodgson before joining the Prime Minister’s staff.
They worked hard, drank together at the Beehive bar, 3.2, and played indoor netball.
Some of the bright young things in that crowd were not all ministerial advisers. Darren Hughes was a young first-term MP at the time and Beehive press secretary Jason Knauf went on to become a royal press secretary to Prince William and Kate and was caught up in the conflict over the Sussexes.
Hutt South MP Ginny Andersen, whom Hipkins made a minister this year, also started out in the Beehive in that era, first as a private secretary to Margaret Wilson and Mark Burton when they held the Treaty Negotiations portfolio and then as a political adviser to David Cunliffe. After a falling out with Cunliffe, she went to Mallard’s office.
The 2002–2005 term had many significant events domestically for Labour. And Hipkins was working in the office of a minister deeply involved. Through Mallard, he had an inside view of some of the most difficult issues and how they were addressed.
The Court of Appeal’s Ngati Apa decision on the foreshore and seabed came out in 2003, allowing ownership to be tested in court; a speech by National leader Don Brash at Orewa in 2004 sparked racial division and propelled National up the polls (Clark made Mallard Co-Ordinating Minister for Race Relations); the Māori Party was formed in opposition to Labour’s Foreshore and Seabed legislation ; Working for Families was introduced in 2004; and KiwiSaver was introduced in 2005.
London and back again
Hipkins left the Beehive after the close 2005 election delivered Labour a third term and spent a year based in London and backpacking around Europe.
In London, he worked for the Health Professions Council, which sets and maintains standards for the professions it regulates. He often caught up with Ardern, who was in London at the same time, and he remembers them attending together the unveiling by Helen Clark of the war memorial in Hyde Park.
He returned to the Beehive, working for Steve Maharey in 2007 and then for Clark after Maharey stepped down from Cabinet ahead of his job as Massey University Vice-Chancellor.
Hipkins had returned with his eye on the Rimutaka seat (since renamed Remutaka), which was being vacated by Paul Swain after 18 years in politics.
It was rumoured union leader Andrew Little might go for the seat. At the time he was national secretary of the Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union (EPMU), but he eventually left his run at politics for another term. There had also been talk that Shane Jones, then a Labour list MP, might go for it.
But Hipkins had decided to go for it anyway. It was, as some saw it, Hipkins doing it his way.
The selection came down to two candidates: Hipkins and northerner Paul Chalmers, who had grown up in Wainuiomata. Chalmers was a close friend of Swain and Paul Tolich, a powerful figure in the EPMU union at the time and in Wellington Labour. They had all been part of the young Catholic left.
Chalmers, who was in his 50s and had stood in Whangārei previously, was backed by Swain and the EPMU. Hipkins, aged 29, was favoured by head office - and Helen Clark - and won the nomination.
Hipkins wanted to work part-time in the run-up to the election. David Cunliffe had a vacancy and was happy to have a part-time adviser so Hipkins ended up working for him – ironic given Hipkins’ public criticism of Cunliffe a few years later.
The election was a close-run thing in Rimutaka in 2008 with the popular Swain retired and a swing to National’s John Key. Hipkins’ majority in his first election was only 753, compared to Swain’s 8277 in 2005. But it has steadily grown and by the most recent election he had the second largest majority in the country at 20,497 - second only to Ardern in Mt Albert.
Opposition and civil war
Hipkins entered Parliament in 2008 with 12 other new MPs: Jacinda Ardern and Grant Robertson, plus Carol Beaumont, Brendon Burns, Clare Curran, Kelvin Davis, Raymond Huo, Stuart Nash, Rajen Prasad, Carmel Sepuloni, William Sio and Phil Twyford.
Civil war over leadership was the recurring theme of Hipkins’ nine years in Opposition. He spent nine years under five different Labour leaders. But it was always clear who Hipkins had supported in the various contests: 2008 Phil Goff, there was no contest; 2011 Shearer in Shearer vs Cunliffe; 2013 Robertson in Robertson vs Cunliffe and Shane Jones; 2014 Robertson in Robertson vs Andrew Little, David Parker and Nanaia Mahuta; 2017 Jacinda Ardern instead of Andrew Little.
Factions started to form in that first term around the questions of leadership. Supporters of former minister David Cunliffe believed the leadership vote to elect Phil Goff after Helen Clark’s resignation had been too fast and had been pre-ordained.
When Goff resigned in term two and the caucus elected newcomer David Shearer over Cunliffe, the feelings hardened and the divisions became more serious because they involved not just the caucus but the party’s ruling New Zealand Council.
A council review of the 2011 election proposed a series of constitutional changes that would remove the sole power of the caucus to elect the leader and share it among members and affiliated unions.
Some opponents saw it as a constitutional coup instigated by the NZ Council against Shearer and in favour of Cunliffe.
Some supporters of the changes believed the anti-Cunliffe faction (including Hipkins) had installed Shearer as a caretaker leader until the time was right for Grant Robertson to take over. And they argued that other parties such as Labour in Britain had democratised their leadership selection by extending it to members.
‘Not quite the angel he looks like’
Hipkins, who had been promoted to chief whip in his second term, had already earned a reputation of being a direct talker and more likely to answer a question than demure as so many MPs do.
Shearer decided to hold a caucus confidence vote in his leadership after the conference passed the controversial voting changes empowering members and unions. For three days running, Cunliffe refused to express support for him or rule out a challenge.
Hipkins came out and not only said Cunliffe should put up or shut up, he publicly said Cunliffe’s actions had been “dishonest and disingenuous” and that he had undermined both Goff and Shearer. Cunliffe eventually backed Shearer but was demoted and Cunliffe supporters considered a formal complaint to the NZ Council about Hipkins.
So were his comments on Cunliffe a reflex response to a reporter’s question, I asked Hipkins, or did he think about it beforehand?
“I certainly gave it a lot of thought,” he said. “I was appalled at the way he was behaving. The particular set of events that led to that was he had basically organised the Labour Party conference in 2012 against the then leader [David Shearer] and then was trying to claim in public he had nothing to do with any of that and I think that was appalling and so I said so.”
Hipkins has a reputation of being good-natured but he can also be harsh and highly political.
“I have a set of standards and I think people should treat each other with respect and I think there’s a certain decency and honesty you need to have in politics and when people don’t behave that way, when need be I’ll call them out on it.”
Hipkins’ first job in politics was spokesman for Internal Affairs which sounds boring but, from his experience in a ministerial office, he knew there was often buried treasure in a seemingly dry set of statistics or reports.
One colleague said he asked more written questions in that term than anyone else in Labour – often to help others get information baselines for their portfolio areas - and the parliamentary website backs that up. He asked 3210 in that first term and only 198 were on the internal affairs portfolio (compared with Robertson’s 1366, and Ardern’s 1235, for example).
He also showed his willingness to get his hands dirty in the political sense. He asked a series of questions about how much money various Crown agencies had spent hosting visitors at Antoine’s restaurant in Auckland when it was owned by a prominent National supporter.
He is not the angel everyone thinks he is, said one of Cunliffe’s supporters of that time. Robertson, Ardern and Hipkins operated as a triumvirate to try to get Robertson elected.
Shearer won his confidence vote in 2012 but in August 2013 his own supporters lost confidence in him. He resigned and Hipkins backed Grant Robertson in an unsuccessful contest against Cunliffe. When Cunliffe resigned after the 2014 election, Hipkins backed Robertson again in a close contest against Andrew Little. But union support for Little made the difference and Robertson vowed he would not stand for the leadership again.
The quiet coup
Little did well to bring some discipline to the divided caucus over the term but he was not connecting with the public and less so in election year, 2017. His deputy, Jacinda Ardern, had vowed not to challenge Little and the first draft of history suggests Little selflessly fell on his sword for the good of the party to let her take over. He did but there was more to it. Hipkins and Robertson helped him on his way. It was a quiet coup.
Little was very nervous about falling polls in late July and had considered resigning. Hipkins and Robertson made that happen with the backing of party luminaries such as Michael Cullen and Annette King. They knew there could be no question of Little being forced out. They had to persuade Ardern to accept the leadership if it were vacated and they hit the phones to put together a deal.
The deal involved offering Kelvin Davis the position of Ardern’s deputy. The Māori caucus comprised 20 per cent of the caucus and had been strongly loyal to Little. Having the Māori caucus onside with Ardern was likely to push Little into the decision to go. And in the party’s 101-year history, it had never had a Māori in a leadership role. Annette King made the call to Davis and on the night of July 31, an alternative leadership team was secured with the backing of a caucus majority. Little resigned on the morning of August 1.
Hipkins’ willingness to get his hands dirty was reinforced later that month when Ardern, as Labour leader, was publicly forced to reprimand him for having been caught up in an Australian scandal and diplomatic incident involving the citizenship of its Deputy Prime Minister, Barnaby Joyce.
Hipkins had lodged questions about Australians holding New Zealand citizenship at the request of a friend in the Australian Labor Party – although the Australian media broke the scandal without having that information. Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop criticised NZ Labour’s involvement and Ardern said Hipkins’ action had been unacceptable.
A few weeks later, the 2017 election was held. From a standing start of 24 per cent polling when Ardern took over, she led Labour to a 36.9 per cent result and into the arms of New Zealand First which chose Labour over National to form a coalition government.
Government and crisis
From the outset, Hipkins had a heavy workload as a minister, taking on Education, State Services and Leader of the House.
It was not a great start to his duties as Leader of the House when the whips could not guarantee on the first day of the House that they had sufficient numbers to elect Trevor Mallard as Speaker.
On-the-hoof negotiations were conducted with then shadow leader of the House, Simon Bridges, who haggled extra places on select committees, and Mallard was elected unopposed.
Hipkins was one of the more prepared ministers for Government, having been education spokesman in Opposition for six years.
But his public profile soared to a different league with the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021.
Incredible challenges struck just about every corner of Government and its services during Covid but the four ministers most heavily involved were Ardern, Robertson, Megan Woods and Hipkins.
After the resignation of Health Minister David Clark in July 2020, Hipkins added the Health portfolio to his workload until the 2020 election. He ran many of the press conferences related to Covid management, most famously the X-rated one in which he said people in lockdown could “spread their legs”, when he meant to say “stretch their legs”.
With some notable exceptions, people seemed to like his easy manner, his overall competence and ability to admit errors.
Labour was returned with an outright majority in 2020, due in no small part to the way the Government had dealt with an extraordinary challenge, and in part to National imploding over leadership divisions.
Hipkins was then made Covid-19 Response Minister and Andrew Little took over Health.
The three-month Auckland lockdown for Delta in 2021 and the MIQ lottery system to quarantine inbound travellers were difficult issues to manage and deeply polarising.
Hipkins has said in retrospect the lockdown was too long. He also apologised to journalist Charlotte Bellis after getting into a public spat with her about her MIQ application but defended MIQ overall.
The deep dark Christmas secret
With the disbanding of MIQ and the opening of the borders, other issues, including gang violence and ram raids, got traction in 2022. Covid management was handed to Ayesha Verrall while Hipkins was given Police, cementing his role as a “fix-it” minister in the same vein as Steven Joyce had been in National.
But as Hipkins went into Christmas last year, labour shortages, and inflation were creating problems nationwide and the restructured health system was under immense pressure. The Opposition was effective in criticising the health reforms, and policies such as co-governance in the Three Waters reforms and the proposed TVNZ-RNZ merger.
Ardern went into Christmas with the deep secret that she was considering stepping down as Prime Minister, known only to a few people - including Robertson and Hipkins.
Whatever her decision, she had already foreshadowed a culling of policies in the New Year and the so-called policy “bonfire” was a convenient place for Hipkins to start when he took over as Prime Minister on January 25.
In the scheme of all Labour’s policies, not many were dropped. But ditching or deferring a range, such as hate speech laws, the speed reduction programme, the social insurance scheme and the TVNZ merger came to symbolise a fresh start.
Hipkins: “I think there’s a range of areas where we have picked too many battles all at the same time and at the same time, we haven’t always explained to people what we are doing and why we are doing them.”
He included Māori policy in that – policy under Labour which includes a Māori health authority, reserved places for Māori in water management entities and a greater emphasis on the Treaty relationship in Government policy.
“In the Māori politics space, I think not explaining to people what we are doing and why we are doing it has sometimes meant we have alienated people who have nothing to fear from what we are doing.”
He said he did not resile from any of it and the work being done to address disparities in health and education was “absolutely justifiable”.
“But I think we need to take more care to make sure that for non-Māori New Zealanders, for whom this is new territory, that we are actually bringing them along for the journey. "
Māori policy and polarisation
So have the Māori issues he has dealt with as Prime Minister been the most difficult?
“Yes and no,” says Hipkins.
“I can see the perspective of some of those who are more sceptical around Māori issues, which I find a charitable way of describing it.”
He had grown up at a time when attitudes towards Māori asserting Māori identity and self-determination had not been as prominent as they were now.
“A lot of it comes from a bit of fear and uncertainty. I can kind of understand that. I don’t agree with it but I can understand it.
“And I hope that means in time as a political leader I can lead, I can actually help to further our race relations debate as a country because I think sometimes it gets polarised unnecessarily.”
For Rose and Doug Hipkins, there is no need to talk about pride in their son and the hope for his success in October so he can continue leading.
It is self-evident.
And their son acknowledges the huge support they are to him.
“I couldn’t do it without them,” he said.
Rose, the mother and skilled observer, said the job of being a politician was actually two jobs and Chris enjoyed them both: the pastoral care aspect of being electorate MP and the technical job of making laws.
“And then, I can see now when you get to the position he is, there is a third type of job which is a systems job and looking at how the pieces join to each other and what the consequences are - not the immediate next step consequences, but two, three, four and five steps out - and he is very good at doing that sort of thinking.
“He does it on the beach, a lot of it, I think. He loves walking on the beach. Always has. He was brought up to it.”
Audrey Young covers politics as the New Zealand Herald’s senior political correspondent. She was named Political Journalist of the Year at the Voyager Media Awards in 2023, 2020 and 2018. She was previously political editor, leading the Herald’s Press Gallery team at Parliament.
