Opinion: Can Chris Hipkins Pull it Off?

By Walter Hamer Zamalis

The 2023 New Zealand general election was one in which Aotearoa saw nothing in its future, and so voted according to its grievances. A discordant and divided opposition, with nothing in common except a lust for power, was what triumphed. The result was a coalition government nobody wanted. I keep asking myself the same thing. Where was the Labour Party? Where was the old government’s vigour and fight, when the most vulnerable people needed it to triumph?

We can look at the Labour party that year, at their bland, unenthusiastic campaign. The slashing of the policy promises they had yet to deliver on in February. The refusal to even mention the policy successes they had made, such as the Māori health authority, Water Reform, the Fair Pay agreements act, and Te Whatu Ora. The refusal to give Māori voters something to believe in, leading to safe seats in Auckland and Māori electorates slipping from the party’s fingers. We can blame Chris Hipkins for his captain’s call to vehemently rule out a capital gains tax, against polling repeatedly showing widespread support for one. We can do all of this and more, but ultimately, focusing on 2023 won’t tell us how to solve the problem of how Labour did so badly. It’s more complicated than that.

The crux of this piece is, simply, that Labour was never doomed to lose the 2023 election. Nor that Chris Hipkins - who was objectively an honest man with integrity - a catastrophic choice who led the party to the worst defeat of any government in New Zealand history. When people make these points to me, it riles me up. It amounts to saying that the left is doomed to fail nationally unless in truly exceptional circumstances. 

In the months since that day - in which I voted for the first time - I’ve regarded Labour’s loss as not Chris Hipkins’ loss. It was one from deep within the Labour Party, but overwhelmingly, it was a New Zealand failure. The failure of our political environment to create a broad church, leftward Labour Party, who could go into office and create the fundamental change that both its loyal supporters want and which most of our people badly need. 

Instead, we have a Labour Party that has been fundamentally weak and centrist since its defeat in 2008. Pākehā-dominated, it has also been chronically willing to put Māori aside for decades. Despite rising inequality and harsh austerity measures explicitly opposed by a referendum, in 2008, 2011 and 2013, Labour chose weak and invisible leaders in Phil Goff, David Shearer and David Cunliffe, three uninspiring white men from Auckland. Even if Goff grew up with nothing, he scarcely acted like it, openly coveting New Zealand First over the Greens as a coalition partner. Māori issues were once again, of course, sidelined, just as they always are by both parties - but Labour’s the one who hurts voters when they do. Although openly more leftward than his predecessors, when it came to building the broad coalition he needed to win in 2014, David Cunliffe was clumsy, inarticulate, and cocky, and ultimately just tried to please everyone. It was a burning shame to my nine-year-old self how quickly his leadership derailed into disaster.  

Thereafter, Labour inexplicably repeated itself, electing another uncharismatic leader who promoted unremarkable, Pākehā-centric policy. This time, Andrew Little. But less than two months before the 2017 election, he fell on his sword, giving Jacinda Ardern the leadership. But anyone who regards this as a turning point for Labour as a party is wrong. Ardern didn’t go on to win the election. Bill English won 44% of the vote and lost just 3 seats, an honestly remarkable result for a man who had led his party to its worst ever defeat just fifteen years before. The cracks in Labour’s youthful, transformational campaign soon began to show. It was fantastic communication with floundering delivery. 

Looking back on the preferred prime minister polling for these three leaders, it’s overwhelming how popular John Key seems to have been. But John Key was never a superstar politician like Ardern. It’s just that there was no viable alternative that Labour could provide. 

It’s fundamentally wrong to look at that as an unavoidable fate, rather than consistently tone-deaf choices seeking to please centrist Pākehā swing voters rather than mobilise young people, Māori and Pasifika. John Campbell reflected solemnly on how, in 2023, just 46% of voters aged 18-24 enrolled to vote in the economically deprived safe Labour seat of Māngere, compared to 85% in the wealthiest electorate, Epsom (held safely by ACT’s David Seymour). “Labour couldn’t mobilise young people in the country’s poorest electorates” nor “persuade them that they mattered”, Campbell said. A big-hearted man, Campbell’s paragraph has always stuck with me as being particularly moving. “That’s on Labour. And it’s a terrible failure. I wrote about this, again and again”. 

I’ve laid out the facts here, enough to point to a sickness within the Labour Party, a deep complacency that perpetually sabotages their chances. Therefore, it shouldn't be controversial to say Chris Hipkins is not to blame for his party's loss in 2023. It's an open secret he isn't. 

Stay with me here. If this wasn't the case, why has he been allowed to stay as leader? Why do a significant chunk of the party faithful want him to stay as leader? It's because they know deep down that the longer he stays, the more sore a reminder he is to Middle New Zealand of the sensible and hard-working dad from the Hutt Valley they threw under a bus for an inexperienced and nauseatingly incompetent businessman.

Jim McAloon, professor of Labour Party history here at Vic, agrees with me. I meet with him one morning in his little office, where the books - and there are many - dangle on and off the shelves like ill-fitted parapets. We sit down on these huge, nearly vertical leather armchairs, likely older than the both of us. A consensus that Hipkins is not culpable for the drubbing? “There certainly seems to be”, McAloon says. “The reason is a pragmatic assessment of reality”. 

The evidence is threefold. First, there was “no obvious alternative to Ardern”. There still isn’t, no matter what the Dominion may say about Kieran McAnulty. Second, the next generation “hasn’t been there a long time”, to put it mildly. It seems bizarre to say, but when David Parker resigns this month, it will be Chris Hipkins (elected in 2008) who succeeds him as the longest continuously serving member of the Labour caucus. The only “Old Labour” MP remaining is Damien O’Connor, who has represented the West Coast intermittently since 1993. Meanwhile, Barbara Edmonds, considered Hipkins’ de facto deputy, was only elected in 2020. Labour are stuck with Hipkins, but there is no disquiet; they are keeping the faith. Why?

I ask McAloon if an analogy can be drawn to Mike Moore, the tough Labour prime minister who lost in a similarly punitive landslide in 1990, only to ride back strong on the coattails of an unprecedentedly unpopular National government and nearly win in 1993. But McAloon disagrees. Moore, he says, ran a bad campaign. The former union stalwart “did himself a lot of damage” by secluding himself from the party in his office with his own arrogant staffers and hand-picked advisors. Very un-Chippy-like behaviour. And furthermore, “Moore had rivals - Chippy has none”. Moore was rolled by one of them - Helen Clark - almost immediately after the 1993 election.  

So who is the elusive historical figure Chris Hipkins is emulating? The answer may surprise you. “An analogy can be drawn to Keith Holyoake, not Mike Moore” says McAloon. Holyoake - National prime minister and our longest-serving postwar leader - first got the top job abruptly in 1957, after popular PM Sidney Holland resigned. Holyoake then lost to Labour three months later. But Labour’s majority was thin, and its leadership under the ailing Walter Nash - who had been involved in the party for its entire history - was muddling and unpopular. 

So what did Holyoake do? “He simply waited them out until they fell apart”. National won the 1960 election in a landslide, and Holyoake remained undefeated until he stepped aside in 1972. Holyoake is the last PM to get the job mid-term, lose, and then win the next time, and it was only the staggering unpopularity of Labour’s “black budget” taxes on alcohol and cigarettes that let him do it. 

With an anti-Treatyist government in the midst of a dire recession, Hipkins seems to think he can do it too. That’s why he is so invisible and risk-averse - he cannot have any attention diverted away from how badly the public believe the Government is performing. The inertia that cursed Labour in office is helping them in opposition.

The only question that remains is this - when the next election comes, will Labour have awoken significantly from their soporific final years to hold onto power? Would that require Hipkins going? “If he didn’t step down, you would have to organise the coup” says McAloon. And that’s the thing - nobody has. There hasn’t been a leadership spill like in 2008 (in which Phil Goff was coronated), nor a three-way dogfight like when David Shearer resigned in 2013. Caucus, through narrow polling and all, has stuck by Chippy resolutely. They seem to have looked at Luxon, as he gets weaker than a custard square under a backside, and have learnt the great lesson of Napoleon. Never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake.