One Vision
Chris Hipkins on the budget and beyond.
I had a dream when I was young
A dream of sweet illusion
A glimpse of hope and unity
And visions of one sweet union
But a cold wind blows, and a dark rain falls
And in my heart, it shows
Look what they've done to my dream, yeah
Songwriters: Brian May / Freddie Mercury / John Deacon / Roger Taylor
With Monday a public holiday, we missed Christopher Luxon’s weekly absence from the Breakfast programme, which was taking a break yesterday. Today, it was Chris Hipkin’s turn to speak to Tova.
Having thought about it, I identified five key areas to consider during the interview: what National has said it has achieved, what it claims it will achieve, its budget priorities, what each party will do if re-elected, and whether it can convey that message to the public convincingly. Let’s briefly run through each before we see how well Chippy addresses them.
What National has said it achieved, but hasn’t.
Nicola Willis claimed that the government has reduced government debt, but that isn’t even vaguely true, as per this comment from Graeme Edgeler, a well-known barrister whose comments are politically neutral and free of hyperbole, yet who could not ignore the blatant falsehoods being presented:
What National claims they will achieve: a surplus a year earlier than predicted, albeit two years later than they campaigned on in 2023.
If you watched Nicola Willis on Q&A over the weekend, you will have seen Jack Tame point out just how far short of Treasury predictions we have fallen over the last two years in every metric.
Making it pretty obvious to all but Nicola that what already sounds like an optimistic future prediction was unlikely to deliver the surplus that Willis was crowing about. No doubt she will continue to claim it, but hopefully people remember the last time she told them to trust her numbers.
Budget Priorities
The government has prioritised road upgrades in the Waikato and increased military spending over things like cancer prevention, which is cruel in the extreme and will result in people dying younger than they needed to.
We had the spectacle of Chris Penk wanting to look into buying nuclear-powered submarines, while we're not funding prostate cancer prevention. Just terrible priorities.
And in terms of those roads, how can it possibly cost $1.7b to build a 16km expressway from Cambridge to Piarere? That’s more than $100m per km!
What they will do if re-elected.
National have gnashed their teeth over Labour choosing to wait until the budget was released before announcing their policies. What they don’t tell you, though, is that they themselves haven’t released any policies.
That’s right, Labour are yet to announce their policies, but so too are National. We know there will be something about raising the age of entitlement to Super, but who knows what else they have planned; their website focuses on things they claim to have done, with no 2026 policies on show.
Maybe they’ve decided there is no point; if Christopher Luxon is just going to give away everything they want in a coalition negotiation, why bother having policies? But it does seem remarkably hypocritical given how much stick they’ve given Labour for not releasing their policies.Whether they can convey their message to the public.
Christopher Luxon has difficulty getting his message across, and he refuses to appear on camera for an interview. What intelligible utterances there are allow us to divine that he is out of touch with most Kiwis.
National has long given up on the idea that the more we get to know him, the more we’ll like him, and is keeping him under wraps while he presumably undergoes intense media training ahead of the election.
In his place, we’ve seen Nicola Willis working very hard but lacking the ability to connect with other human beings. For example, take a look at this shot from Budget Day at just how condescending and smug she looks while delivering her master plan to other parties:
Nicola Willis and the Greens. Chris Hipkins is an excellent communicator; he considers matters carefully and articulates mature, common-sense replies, but the question for me is: can he move beyond that to offer the compelling, tub-thumping alternative that would see the public abandon National after one term?
The Interview.
They began with Tova in front of a large screen listing Labour’s policies announced to date: The Future Fund, a Capital Gains Tax paying for three free Doctors’ visits, the Family Doctor Loan Scheme, and Free Cervical Screening.
Tova, of course, asked when we would see the rest of the policies, with no comment on the fact that National have yet to release theirs, assuming they plan to come up with something more appetising than the budget.
Chippy beamed; he was warm and friendly and confirmed there would be more policy announcements in June as they work through the budget. A tidy haircut, a very nice-looking suit; the Labour man looked the part, although it’s all upside after a week of seeing Nicola Willis dressed as a marshmallow.
Tova rudely said she’d believe it when she saw it, but Chippy remained calm and said it was important to align their plans with the budget, as he would inevitably be asked which parts of the budget they would keep and which they would change.
They moved to areas that Labour would repeal, beginning with pay equity, and Hipkins said, “We’ve been clear that we think women should be paid properly and the government’s change this time last year, that took pay equity away from women and basically said to them even if you’re doing work that is the same value as men you should expect to be paid less for that. We don’t think that was justifiable.”
On the question of Fees Free, Hipkins said they hadn’t had a chance to sit down and discuss which parts of the budget they would keep. Given how long it had been clear that National were planning to get rid of the programme, I felt Labour should have had some sort of position on the cancellation of an initiative they had put in place.
Tova asked whether they would reduce defence spending, a question I hadn’t anticipated, but I was very interested in the answer. I think the level of military expenditure in National’s budget showed a party more focused on pleasing America’s leadership than on looking after Kiwis. Two per cent of GDP is too much in my view, let alone the absurd level of 3.5% that Pete Hegseth has been asking for.
Hipkins said that was unlikely, which was probably the right call politically, as Kiwis want to feel that we are equipping our troops well and that they’re not running around in Dad’s Army-style cardboard tanks.
As for Hegseth's demands, Chippy quite rightly said that no country should dictate how another country spends its money and that we need to make investments based on our own needs.
The Labour man sounded a lot like a leader to me, unlike certain other people.
As you would expect from the party that did so much to make us proud with our Nuclear Free stance, Hipkins wasn’t having any of Chris Penk’s consideration of nuclear-powered submarines and made it clear that NZ would remain nuclear-free under Labour.
Tova said there had been online vitriol over Lynda Topp’s speech, in which she said that too much was being spent on the military and not enough on the arts.
That made me sad, to think that there were Kiwis out there who responded to such a wonderful speech with anger and hate. Chippy said that Lynda had a point and that, “Our artistic community brings so much to NZ. They make NZ a much richer, more diverse and vibrant place to live and we should be supporting our artistic community.”
It was a good interview from Hipkins, and I would be proud to have him as Prime Minister again. I look forward to hearing about the rest of Labour’s policies, and I think Chippy will go well on the campaign trail. He has a thick skin and a calmness that Luxon does not possess.
As for tracking what National have claimed they will achieve, I think the media need to do far more than simply explain to Nicola Willis why she is wrong and hope she gets it; they need to be yelling from the rooftops as we approach the election that Nicola’s house of cards wouldn’t even survive a stiff breeze.
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Have a good Tuesday, folks. 🙂
Ngā mihi,
Nick.
To end today, 40 years ago today, Queen released their 12th studio album, A Kind of Magic. I used to listen to it often on my Walkman when I was delivering the Herald as a schoolboy. Here is the opening track, One Vision, that ends with Fried Chicken:
Chippie is infinitely more appealing than the three stooges currently calling the shots, but if we want to motivate the hesitant voters we need more - Mamdani style excitement, a sense that things can be genuinely better (and different).
An excellent post Nick. Thankyou. And please stop discounting the subscription to your very wonderful korero. It is worth far more than $1 per week. You know it. I know it. We all know it. But I know we all have to get through these hard times. One way or another.