Chris Hipkins says Labour has got more cut-through in its first year of Opposition than he expected at the start and his own polling has held up better than he’d hoped.
In an end-of-year interview, the Labour Party leader outlined what he views as a successful first third of the Parliamentary term and his strategy for taking back power in 2026.
“You go back to last year, we got 26 point something percent of the vote. If you said to me, in your first year in Opposition you can climb back up into the 30s. To be starting to nudge well into the 30s, seeing numbers more like 33, 34 – not in all polls but in some of them – I’m very happy with that,” he says.
Only one public poll has shown Labour at 33 percent – a survey for corporate clients by the party’s pollster Talbot Mills – but Hipkins says the weekly internal tracking he’s seeing shows the trend is upwards.
“It’s very good. Certainly well ahead of where I was expecting to be at this point in the electoral cycle.”
Hipkins credits some of that to the caucus’ remarkable unity over the past year. By this stage after the 2020 election, Judith Collins had flamed out as National’s leader and been replaced by Christopher Luxon, after months of rumours of coup plots in the making.
Notwithstanding the occasional barb in the House from the Government benches, no one is seriously discussing a plan to oust Hipkins. He says the caucus feels comfortable expressing disagreements. An open session after the election defeat where MPs were encouraged to air their grievances with the campaign and the party’s performance for six years in government opened the lines of communication.
“That actually opened up a really positive space for the caucus to be in. We weren’t focused on preserving unity for appearances’ sake. We managed to preserve unity by creating a really positive working culture where people were able to say, ‘I didn’t like this’ or ‘I thought we got this wrong’.”
There have been no anonymous leakers and only a couple of cases of MPs speaking to the media about issues beyond their remit – as when David Parker opined on tax policy earlier in the year. Hipkins believes the open internal environment meant “no one felt the need to go out there and detonate the whole thing”.
That said, he has spent a year batting off media questions that imply his leadership will be short-lived. Hipkins’ refrain has been clear and consistent: He’s not keeping the seat warm for someone else, he genuinely intends to keep the Labour leader job through the election.
‘The only person that I’ve heard talk about woke identities is Shane Jones. No one else is talking about it, everyone else is just embracing the view that you live and let live.’
Chris Hipkins
What would make him give it up?
“If I thought I couldn’t win, then that would change that. But I don’t think that’s the case. I think I can,” he says.
“Labour’s doing better than I anticipated and I’m personally doing better. I sort of expected, becoming Leader of the Opposition, you’d move from positive territory into negative territory just by the nature of the job. You’re basically complaining about things all the time. But I haven’t, I still have a net favourable rating and I wasn’t expecting that by the end of the first year; I was expecting that to have shifted quite a lot.”
For his own personal polling, Hipkins credits his selectiveness about what he complains about.
“I know it’s frustrating for some of the political commentariat who want to see us barking at every passing car, but the fact that we haven’t done that, I actually think the public like that.”
On the flip side, while Hipkins has let some things slide without comment, he says it’s been hard to find areas of cross-partisan collaboration with the Government. On infrastructure and education, he says the Government is “being the most overtly political about those issues than any government in recent history”.
When Hipkins was education minister under Jacinda Ardern, he continued his predecessor’s practice of involving the Opposition education spokesperson in big projects around the curriculum and assessments.
“I saw myself having a bigger duty than just to the government. It was to kids who are there in school for 13 years.”
National’s Nikki Kaye was game, he recalls, but her replacement Nicola Willis had no interest and Erica Stanford – the current minister – “was more interested in immigration than she was in education”.
Hipkins laments the Government’s politicisation of education, given a 15-year-old with poor grades today has spent more time learning under a National government than a Labour one. Policy in education alone is not the way to improve outcomes, he insists. Asked about his greatest passions, he doesn’t identify education but instead lands on inequality.
“So many of the other things connect to it. When we’re talking about crime, when we’re talking about educational achievement, when we’re talking about health outcomes, so much of that actually ties back to inequality,” he says.
“It’s not actually a political thing. It’s not government policy that’s causing the decline in our Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) statistics. I just think that’s dishonest politicking frankly. It’s much broader than that. When you really bore into those Pisa stats, inequality is the huge driver. The relationship between inequality and New Zealand’s decline in the Pisa rankings is irrefutable.”
Hipkins has also appeared fired up about Treaty and Māori-Crown relations this year, after dumping some work on co-governance when he was briefly Prime Minister in 2023. That, he says, is less about a personal passion (although he believes it’s important) and more a frustration with the Government’s jeopardising of a hard-fought consensus on race relations.
“The bit that I really object to there is the divisive nature of it. It’s not a constructive conversation. If they want to have a debate about, where does the Treaty fit within the future constitutional arrangements of the country, all good. Actually, a lot of Māori want to have that debate too,” he says.
“But the Treaty Principles Bill’s not doing that. I’d liken it to throwing a hand grenade into a crowded room of people and then complaining that everybody starts to scream. That’s what they’re doing. I really object to the approach, because it’s just such blatant dog-whistle racism. It’s designed to scratch and itch for political advantage, not to actually have a constructive conversation. I hate that kind of politics.”
It is, he says, a culture war – something the Government has become more and more obsessed with.
“There’s nothing they want more than culture wars. Winston Peters and his war on trans people is another example of that. I saw Shane Jones put something on Facebook the other day where he said, ‘If you spend more time talking about woke identities than you do about creating jobs, you’ll never be government’ or whatever. The only person that I’ve heard talk about woke identities is Shane Jones. No one else is talking about it, everyone else is just embracing the view that you live and let live. People should be free to be who they are.”
Looking forward to next year – and to the election in 2026 – Hipkins says these sorts of messages aren’t the winning ones. Instead, Labour has to do two things. First, it has to put forward credible policies it has worked through the details on. And second, it has to harness the “vibe” of the campaign.
‘Are New Zealanders’ lives getting better or worse, since there’s been a change of government? Increasingly, the number of people I speak to say it’s getting worse, not better.’
Chris Hipkins
On policy, he concedes that Labour’s reputation on big promises has been bruised.
“Auckland Light Rail and KiwiBuild are held up as the two shining examples. We didn’t have detailed plans for how we were going to implement those when we were in government and that became very transparent very quickly,” he recalls.
But all the detailed modelling and granular costings in the world aren’t going to convince someone to vote for the Labour party on their own. Hipkins says the public doesn’t follow politics all that closely, so while they need credible policies and plans to pass the sniff test – and to actually be ready for government – they also need a more compelling message than “We’ll do what we promise”.
Last year, the “vibe” was change, he believes.
“There’s no one thing. It’s the vibe of the campaign. The vibe of the electorate was, ‘It’s time for something different’.”
The message he thinks will be most powerful in 2026 is a simple one: Are you better off now than you were three years ago?
Hipkins was speaking to Newsroom after the Treasury’s updated forecasts showed a return to government surplus would be pushed off two years, but before Stats NZ revealed late in December that New Zealand was still in recession as of the September quarter (and revised its historical figures to show there had been no recession in the last term of Parliament).
Of course, economic figures alone aren’t the determinant of whether people feel better off. In the United States, Donald Trump convincingly returned to power off the back of a similar economic message even though inflation was under control, job growth was spiking and the stock market was booming.
The trick for Hipkins is not to be distracted by what the numbers say, but instead listen to what the voters say.
“The vibe is already starting to take shape. Are New Zealanders’ lives getting better or worse, since there’s been a change of government? Increasingly, the number of people I speak to say it’s getting worse, not better.”
