Labour leader Chris Hipkins enjoys a pie in his self-drive car outside The Bun Factory bakery in Upper Hutt. Photo / Mark Mitchell
We’ve been stuck at a temporary red light at some road works in Upper Hutt for a very, very long time, midway through the drive around Upper Hutt with Labour leader Chris Hipkins.
“You’ll be hoping this isn’t symbolic of your campaign ambitions,” I note.
A few days before this, the first poll had emerged which had Labour dipping into the 20s: the Taxpayers’ Union Curia Poll.
Hipkins grins and says that at least the light is Labour red. “Red is a good thing.”
His press secretary gets out to ask the road workers whether the lights are broken. Hipkins isn’t keen on driving through the red or doing a u-turn in case the police tailing us frown upon it.
So we sit there until a road worker eventually waves us through and we are off.
The weather was abysmal, pelting rain and dark when we met at his house in Upper Hutt an hour or so earlier. His parents were there doing the morning school run, along with their family dogs Bella and Baxter, while Hipkins did his morning media slots.
Hipkins wrestles car seats out of his ministerial electric Hyundai and brandishes a pack of wet wipes, in case of spills.
He checks his press secretary has enough room, turns off the Gordon Lightfoot on the stereo (“Dad’s been driving”) and makes sure DPS sees it is him driving the car so they know to follow. “I promised I’d never try to sneak off on them.”
Eventually we are off.
His brief was to take us to his memorable places and a place of guilty pleasure.
The places he points out as he drives us around include the Pak’nSave where he shops (“because it’s cheaper”). There is a line of op shops, which he is also known to visit occasionally. “I’m quite a frugal shopper, so stuff that’s cheap, I’m all good with that. And I like the waste avoidance aspect of it. People throw away too much stuff these days.”
We stop at his favourite fish and chip shop, Scoops, for a photo.
He points out Upper Hutt College and tells a story about National “in their pork barrelling election in 2008″ promising to rebuild it.
They did rebuild it, but Hipkins claims he deserves the credit for it, because he had pushed them to deliver on that promise as the local MP. We do not mention a certain somebody standing on the Puhoi to Warkworth motorway, cutting a ribbon as if he had single-handedly built a road that National had started and allocated funded for while Labour was calling it the “holiday highway.”
Of course, he himself would not indulge in pork barrelling. “I’d never do something like that. I’m far more principled,” he insists, with only a bit of his tongue in his cheek.
He’s had a fairly bad run in his nine months in the job: a cyclone and then a string of ministers imploding on him. He should be a lot more worried than he seems to be.
But he says he is still enjoying the gig and while he is now being punished in the polls after getting an initial boost in his honeymoon, he insists all is not lost.
“We had a bit of a rough run and I get people were a bit frustrated with us during that time, but I think it’s in the past, we’ve dealt with it and people want to know what we are proposing.”
His hope for salvation sits in his ten-point plan on the cost of living (a combination of efforts to bring inflation down and help with rising costs).
I point out Luxon also says he has a plan.
“But does his have ten points?” Hipkins asks.
The most recently unveiled point was the free dental care for under-30s announced at the party’s launch. He is yet to reveal the final two points in this plan. There is another plan on infrastructure, including the bells and whistles roading and transport plan Labour has set out.
Of course, none of this is pork barrelling, no no.
He has looked at past campaigns a bit for tips.
He points to parallels with 2005 (when first-term MP Don Brash led the National Party and resurrected its polling) and 2017, when Dame Jacinda Ardern took over late in the piece and resurrected Labour’s polling. He hasn’t quite managed to deliver the poll resurrection but is apparently still hopeful it will happen.
He will be hoping the end result is the same as 2005 when Labour and Helen Clark won - just. It may be notable that it is Clark - the leader with experience in the fight when things get tough - who is now pitching it to help him on his campaign, fundraising and speaking at various events.
She spoke at the campaign launch and referred to that 2005 fight by way of driving home to the party faithful that there was still hope.
Hipkins doesn’t mention former National leader Sir Bill English, who took over from Sir John Key at about the same point Hipkins took over from Ardern.
However, Hipkins knows full well he is in a battle against historic precedent: the poisoned chalice of taking over as PM mid-term has proven tricky, whether the handover was smooth (as his and former National leader Bill English’s were), or bitter (as when former National leader Jenny Shipley rolled Jim Bolger.)
It’s a teeth-grinding period, but Hipkins does not seem overly worried – yet – about the polls showing his chances of a third term are tenuous.
He’s looking forward to the campaign, including the debates.
He has not been getting television training but did have a session with actress and acting coach Miranda Harcourt on the art of public speaking.
Did she advise him not to eat in front of the cameras so much?
“You guys follow me round everywhere and a man has to eat. It’s a life necessity!”
While Luxon has trimmed down for the campaign, Hipkins has had a hospitable public serving him up sausage rolls wherever he goes. If they’re gone to the effort, it would be churlish to say no.
He doesn’t get to cycle into work anymore to stay fit. His security told him they would have to close a lane of the motorway so they could drive along beside him.
“I don’t think Wellington commuters would really appreciate that. So I decided that probably wasn’t going to be good for my electoral prospects.”
We pass Brewtown, a combined entertainment and craft beer centre and he says he prefers a single malt over beer, but will sometimes have a pilsner. We go past the first house he lived in after moving to Upper Hutt in 2007.
He liked that house because it was right opposite the train station. He could sit in his living room until he heard the bells at the level crossing ringing and then sprint over to catch the train.
We get sidetracked by a lemon tree, laden with fruit. He tells the sad tale of a lemon tree he planted at the first house he owned which only delivered a few fruit each year for nine years “and then, just when I sold the house, thousands of lemons.”
One question he refuses to answer is whether he subscribes to the belief that peeing on a lemon tree helps with the bounty. He accuses the Herald of “mischief.”
So far, so plain old Chippy from the Hutt, just an ordinary bloke – and one whose job is on the line in a month’s time.
The guilty pleasure is the last stop on the tour - one of his favourite pie shops, the Bun Factory.
Hipkins is the only man in a suit in the pie shop and the only one with diplomatic protection squad officers standing guard over him.
The few other customers are tradies.
It’s unclear whether they recognise him. If they do, they don’t seem to care two hoots, they just want their pies. He has been the local MP since 2008, after all.
He waits in line and the staff recognise him: he has been a fairly frequent visitor over the years.
Election campaigns are a marathon of small talk and Luxon, who describes himself as an extrovert, had no qualms about bowling up to people to introduce himself and exchange pleasantries in a café on the NZ Herald’s earlier drive with him.
Hipkins is all confidence in the media, in Parliament and on the stage at a big event.
But when it comes to the small talk of impromptu encounters, Hipkins seems either shy or just reluctant to bail up people who are just going about their daily business and buying pies.
Here and now, the business at hand is buying his pie and his Coke (“you can’t have a pie without a Coke”) and that is what he does.
He gets his steak, bacon and cheese pie and decides to eat in the car.
The flaky pastry is very flaky. He’s a skilled pie eater and manages to keep things tidy.
The Herald does not. Pastry goes everywhere. He is gloriously uncaring about it.
“Oh, don’t worry.” He has a vacuum cleaner of sorts on standby, goes by the name of Baxter.
“I’ll put the dog in the car when we get back. He’ll hoover it up.”
The campaign hoardings have only been up a few days and as we drive back to his house, Hipkins eyeballs some National Party hoardings on a roundabout with its “get our country back on track” slogan.
“Having the word ‘country’ on your hoardings isn’t great when it comes to the vandals,” he muses. “There’s a lot that they can do with that.”
I pretend not to understand what he is referring to, but he’s not fooled by that for a second. A letter or three could be blanked out to form a very rude word indeed.
Had he been tempted to make such an unseemly edit himself? No, no, he insisted, he had just seen them on social media.
His own signs have “In it for you” written on them and he thinks they are fairly edit-resistant.
He’s had a difficult few months so I don’t tell him that in few instances, an SH has been added to the beginning of “it”.
Claire Trevett is the NZ Herald’s political editor, based at Parliament in Wellington. She started at the NZ Herald in 2003 and joined the Press Gallery team in 2007. She is a life member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery.
Fewer families are getting government support thanks to a quirk in our rules.