Chris Hipkins in the Labour leader's office at Parliament, where he is still waiting to properly move in. Photo / Mark Mitchell
As Chris Hipkins adjusts from life as Prime Minister to plain Labour leader, he sits down with Audrey Young to talk about the transition:
It’s the political equivalent of the television reality show Rich House Poor House where Chris Hipkins and Christopher Luxon get to swap jobs and offices.
With Hipkins sitting in the third-floor suite of Parliament House surrounded by unopened boxes in Luxon’s former office, it is clear who’s who.
And for the avoidance of doubt, Hipkins has just arrived after receiving a verbal pummelling in Luxon’s first speech in the House since becoming Prime Minister, with Luxon accusing him of being:
a. Like an arsonist who after having set fire to the place, loiters around at the scene of the crime.
b. Bitter, twisted and negative.
Hipkins was taken aback by the tone of Luxon’s attack and later called the arson analogy inflammatory. But he is not as glum as his comedown suggests he could be.
“I don’t feel bitter and twisted,” he tells the Weekend Herald.
And nor does he feel personally rejected by voters.
“I didn’t take the election result personally. I think it was a reflection of the fact New Zealanders have had a tough time with Covid and cost of living and a whole lot of other things and were just looking for something different.”
The fact the boxes remain unpacked is Luxon’s fault. Luxon had apparently had a bookshelf removed from the office when he became National leader two years ago and Hipkins has to have it reinstalled before he can unpack his boxes – mainly books.
In what Luxon called a humiliating defeat, Labour went from winning an outright majority with 65 seats in 2020 under Jacinda Ardern to just 34 seats in the October election under Hipkins.
But Hipkins is better equipped than many to make the adjustment from the ninth floor of the Beehive to Opposition, having been in Opposition before for nine years.
“There’s positives and negatives to it. One of the things about being in Opposition is you have to be much more self-sufficient and self-managing.
“As an Opposition MP, if you don’t do the job and don’t do the work yourself, no one else does it for you. Whereas in government you’ve got an army of public servants who are doing a lot of work for you.”
As Leader of the Opposition, he had more staff than other MPs do but there was still a more self-motivational aspect to it.
“When you are in government the job just keeps coming at you whereas that is not necessarily how opposition works. So there’s that mental adjustment.
“As Prime Minister, I would listen to the news headlines and that would very much determine my day because as PM you have to be across all those issues. You could be asked about them at any point and you need to know what’s going on.”
As Leader of the Opposition, there was less of an expectation you were going to know everything that was going on in the country.
“So there’s more and less pressure in that. More pressure in that you have to proactively choose the issues that you do want to actively get involved with and less pressure in the sense you are not expected to be across every single one of them.”
There is clearly less pressure on his personal life as well. He gets to go where he wants without a security detail on his tail. He can pop out to Christmas or farewell functions at will. And he can spend more time with his newish partner, Toni Grace, whom he acknowledged in his concession speech on election night.
“There is someone else I want to thank tonight, someone that most of you won’t know, and that is my partner Toni,” he said. “Being Prime Minister is not the only special thing that has happened to me this year.”
The internet went berserk for a while trying to work out whether it was Toni or Tony and then who she was. They met in 2010 when she was a university student and interned for him in his Remutaka electorate office. They were friends but lost touch until earlier this year.
“We exchanged messages over social media as you do and met up for a coffee – both recently separated – just spent a bit of time together and went from there.”
He said they had not tried to keep it a secret but decided that if they were going to reveal the relationship, it would be best after the election. And he decided in the car on the way to give his concession speech.
“I really needed to thank my mum and dad because I wouldn’t have got through the campaign with them doing everything they did to keep my life outside politics functional …
“It just would have felt wrong to have thanked my mum and dad and not to have thanked Toni for the huge amount of support she gave me during that time.
“We agreed in the car I would thank her but I probably went a bit further than she was expecting.”
Hipkins dismisses speculation that he was distracted by her during the campaign and their time together playing online Scrabble.
“Absolutely not. We would sometimes finish one game a week. It was just one of those things. You know you have those moments when you’re just sitting staring out the window and you just want something to switch your brain to something else for a minute. It was kind of in that zone really.”
Hipkins plans to use the summer break as “decompression time” either at home in Upper Hutt or at his beach house in Raumati, and to hit the road with Toni.
“I think we’re planning a bit of a roadie at some point just to get out and about and around.
“It’ll be a Kiwi summer. I just want to get out and enjoy a bit of New Zealand.”
It will be the first summer since 2019 that his head won’t be immersed in work in a big way. In 2020 and 2021 he was deeply involved in the response to Covid-19 and before last year’s summer break, Ardern had told him she was looking to quit in the new year and that he should get ready to become Prime Minister.
He took over the leadership in January after Ardern resigned but wasn’t there long enough to get used to it. And on reflection, he says his highlights in the job were often his lowlights as well.
“Going to Auckland during the floods and going to Hawke’s Bay after the cyclone, whilst they were lowlights in the sense that you saw the extent of what had happened, they were also highlights in the sense that you saw what people were doing and you can’t help feeling uplifted by that.”
He particularly remembered visiting a pub outside Esk Valley that had been turned into a makeshift community centre for displaced residents.
He went into what had been the billiards room and had been turned into a temporary health clinic. He was talking to the local nurse about what people had been treated for and asked how she had been affected by the floods.
“She burst into tears and she said she had lost everything. Her house had been washed away and here she was, working around the clock, providing nursing care. I couldn’t help but feel very moved,” said Hipkins. “It was a highlight in a sense of just to see the human spirit and the dedication of people doing those sorts of things.”
More conventional highlights for him were attending the King’s Coronation, visiting China with a trade delegation, attending the Fieldays and helping for the first time to shape the May Budget with Grant Robertson.
It was a Budget – and campaign – in which he ruled out a wealth tax and capital gains tax, although he has since retreated from that position, saying nothing is ruled out in the party’s policy review this term.
But he rejects a suggestion the party will be forced to go to the left.
“I find that kind of idea that people vote on a left-right spectrum a bit frustrating because they don’t. We had people switching from Act to New Zealand First, for example, and in some cases from the Greens to Act or Act to the Greens.
“People don’t vote on a left-right continuum. They vote on the vibe of the campaign. I probably learned that a lot more in this campaign than I have before because leading it, you definitely get a much greater sense of the vibe of the campaign.
“The general vibe of the campaign was that people were looking for a change and it wasn’t necessarily a policy-driven vibe. It’s just how people were feeling.”
An area in which he would have done things differently was how Labour had handled Māori policy, much of which is being undone by the new Government.
“I don’t write off people who are concerned as racist. I think people are just uncertain. They don’t understand what co-governance means. They don’t understand what the Māori Health Authority would mean. They are concerned about saying ‘well if Māori get this, does it mean I’m going to miss out?’
“I don’t think that is driven from a place of racism. I think that is driven from a place of uncertainty and I think we can answer that but we probably didn’t do a good enough job of doing that.”
The dismantling of measures by the new Government was a backward step and was going to unify Māori in a way that had not been seen for a long time.
“I think that will only grow.”
Hipkins says he is focused on doing three things as Leader of the Opposition over the next three years that defined the sort of leader he wanted to be.
The first was to be effective in holding the Government to account for its promises, including the things that wouldn’t go well such as its Māori policy, and for things it was doing but didn’t campaign on, such as repealing elements of the smokefree laws.
“I don’t want that to be the only thing we do – Oppositions easily fall into that trap of just barking at every passing car.”
In Parliament he listed some of the areas he expects to see results, including lower inflation, lower interest rates, real incomes growing, significant reduction in crime, low unemployment being sustained, clearing the state house waiting list, continuing decline in climate emissions, improving school attendance, improving literacy and numeracy, and getting the books back to surplus at least as quickly as Labour had done.
Second, he said Labour also had to make sure in three years it had a compelling, positive, alternative vision with well-developed and realistic policies to achieve that.
And the Opposition had to go out to the community, listen and rebuild relationships.
“When you’re in Government …the longer you are there the more distant you can become from those communities you serve just because of the nature of the job. It’s all-consuming.”
The caucus agreed those were the priorities.
“There is a sense that we should make the most of this time. We’d rather be in government but we’re not, so let’s make the most of the fact that we’re not and actually use that time to rebuild the relationships, to really rethink some of our policy stuff and to really make sure that in three years’ time, if we win, we go back into government refreshed and ready to have a really good go at it.
“And learn from some of the things we didn’t get right in the last six years.”
The New Zealand Defence force has a budget shortfall of $130 million.