Labour leader Chris Hipkins is trying to convince members to keep the faith. Photo / Corey Fleming
Labour leader Chris Hipkins is promising the party he leads to the 2026 election will be a changed one, one that has listened to the electorate that so unceremoniously turfed him out of office in 2023.
Speaking to the Herald in his parliamentary office before Labour’s 2024 national conference, evidence of change is everywhere. A plush toy coronavirus is the only obvious evidence of Hipkins’ most famous pre-prime ministerial role as Covid minister and behind his desk, nestled rather conspicuously, is a copy of Thomas Piketty’s Capital, beloved by wealth tax backer David Parker, a signal perhaps that Hipkins’ views on tax are evolving.
Change seems likely to come to the Labour caucus too. Hipkins is relaxed and confident during our interview, but things get slightly awkward when I ask about retirements from his caucus.
“There may be a few,” Hipkins says.
Although no MPs have confirmed their intention to retire at the next election, Hipkins admits he has had conversations with at least one MP who is thinking about whether to commit to another term.
“Everybody who’s been in politics for a period of time will start to make those calculations sometime next year,” he says.
He says no one has actually said they are planning not to stand again.
Hipkins says he’s feeling good and the party is feeling “united”. Of course, he has to say that, but it appears to be true. A recent Talbot Mills corporate poll put Labour a single point behind National. The three opposition parties have been nipping at the coalition’s heels – though only overtaking them in a single poll (the 1 News-Kantar poll that ignited a fire under Prime Minister Christopher Luxon).
Unlike National at this point in the political cycle, which was dealing with caucus leaks and Jami-Lee Ross, Labour’s caucus is certifiably united. Despite National’s best efforts to turn Kieran McAnulty into a red Judith Collins, McAnulty has firmly and explicitly disavowed any coup ambitions and his eyebrows, so far, have remained distinctly un-arched.
Yet “united” is a bit of a stretch. The main vector of conflict in Labour isn’t between factions of the caucus, it’s between the caucus and members. In Christchurch, Hipkins will be forced to navigate two challenging votes. The first vote is on a proposal to commit the party to progressing work on some kind of wealth or capital gains tax (CGT) and stopping work on other taxes.
This should pass easily, although Hipkins might face a challenge were members to decide to amend the remit to make it clear they back the wealth tax part of the idea — that might be seen as an implicit loss of confidence in Hipkins whose public statements appear to favour a CGT.
The second, far more challenging proposal, is to change the party’s constitution to make it almost impossible for Hipkins or any Labour leader to make “captain’s calls”. Labour’s constitution already makes what most people would call a “captain’s call” essentially impossible. The remit on the table would make these calls even more impossible by forcing the leader to get agreement from the caucus and policy council first.
Hipkins has come off the fence for this proposal (something he has not done for the tax idea) and called the remit “confused” this week – which some would interpret as a dig at its promoters.
On tax, Hipkins says he’s not going to take a position when the remit comes to the floor to be debated. This year, however, he’s spoken quite warmly about a CGT, noting that more like-minded and like-taxed countries have one than don’t, and noting the opposite is true of a wealth tax.
“The reason that I’m not staking a position on it that is when I do, it will be because we have worked through the detail and we can answer the questions on it and that we’re willing to stand behind it,” Hipkins says, adding that at this point, “remits are indicative, so they’re not binding, they feed into a policy process”.
He has previously conceded Labour will be running on a more progressive tax policy at the 2026 election, but the party hasn’t decided (it is two years away after all) on the far more interesting side of this equation, which is what it would do with the money: will Labour do a “tax switch”, an idea David Parker backhandedly thanked Bill English for in a speech, and which he copied for the wealth tax idea in 2023? This would mean funnelling money raised in new taxes back out into income taxes.
Or, Hipkins could decide to spend the revenue on services, which is what Labour did with its 2020 policy of taxing the highest income earners more than half a billion dollars a year extra — a policy the coalition has been unable to undo.
Hipkins has a dollar each way on this question, answering the questions by talking up the merits of a “tax-free zone” to “ease the pressure on working New Zealanders” (which was part of the wealth tax policy), but also talking about the importance of “generating enough money to support the things that New Zealanders expect us to do” (taxing more to provide better services).
It’s a vexing question for Labour. It’s generally thought to be pretty hard to win an election promising to raise taxes, hence why parties so often try to pair tax hikes with tax cuts, but one of the most obvious pathways to victory for Hipkins probably lies in finding ways to funnel more money into the services put under pressure by the coalition.
One thing Hipkins is promising — and this appears more directed to members grumpy about the wealth tax call than anyone else — is that he will implement the policy the party eventually campaigns on.
“I think what we shouldn’t do though is do the opposite of what we campaign on. So whatever we campaign on is what we should do.
“When we campaigned in 2020 and said that we will not implement a capital gains tax and we will not implement a wealth tax, I think we did the right thing in honouring that,” Hipkins says, referring to his decision to axe work on a wealth tax.
“I think it would have been wrong to say we weren’t going to do something and then do it,” he says.
Hipkins is keeping close to his coalition partners. Controversially, he does not appear to be tacking to the centre, and is instead hewing leftwards, issuing joint statements with Te Pāti Māori and the Greens on the likes of the Treaty Principles Bill and early childhood education.
He’s also hewing close to his potential partners on the matter of whether Parliament’s standing orders should be amended to mete out more severe punishments to the likes of Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke for her haka this month (MPs in the coalition are concerned that the social media attention garnered by such outbursts will make the house dysfunctional).
He supports Speaker Gerry Brownlee’s decision to ask the cross-party standing orders committee to consider the issue but seems to back Te Pāti Māori overall.
“I don’t think we can say that we welcome haka at the conclusion of certain speeches but not others … we’re either saying Māori culture is part of parliamentary protocol or it’s not,” he says.
Part of Hipkins’ challenge is convincing everyone he can win. He thinks he can (of course, he has to say this) and the caucus and members seem mostly on board with the idea that they have a chance.
The biggest mental barrier Hipkins needs to overcome is the fact New Zealand has so few one-term Governments (the last one left office in 1975) and there’s never been a one-term National Government.
This is lazy thinking – as Herald columnist Simon Wilson pointed out (in a column arguing Hipkins should shape up or ship out), National came within a whisker of losing re-election in 1993, and Robert Muldoon lost the popular vote to Labour in each of the three battles for re-election he fought.
The 1993 election is especially instructive. A first-term National Government swept into office with one of the most convincing mandates in history was nearly swept from power after a series of unpopular spending decisions. If that election had been fought under MMP, National would have lost – the combined vote of Labour and the Alliance was over 52%.
The “never been a one-term National Government” argument is especially lazy simply because we don’t have enough MMP elections to ever say “never” about anything. In fact, in the three decades of the MMP era, as it will be by 2026, only one National leader will have successfully won a second term (only one National leader, John Key, has had a shot).
Is the leader to make that history Hipkins? Perhaps. But before he can ask the country to put its faith in him a second time, he’s got to win the faith of Labour’s members.
Thomas Coughlan is deputy political editor and covers politics from Parliament. He has worked for the Herald since 2021 and has worked in the press gallery since 2018.
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