That Don't Impress Me Much.

Hey Chippy - Jessica says your dumb!

In the New Zealand Labour Party Constitution and Rules, on page 64, is the following clause: 9.11.1 No later than 3 months after the date of a General Election, there must be a caucus vote to endorse the Leader of the Labour Party.

Which seems fair enough. In terms of political parties, events don’t come any bigger than an election. So it’s quite understandable that in the situation Labour finds itself in, following a disappointing result, it makes sense to confirm that the leader retains the confidence of the caucus.

It’s a standard process and nothing to fear nor cause fright with. It also makes good sense, why on earth should a party retain a leader that the caucus doesn’t like? Might be best to put that to former leader David Cunliffe, who seems to have a lot to say these days.

But much of the time the best person for the role will remain the same. You just want to do a quick check so you can move on, concentrate on rebuilding, and take the fight to the opposition to keep them on the straight and narrow.

As we know there was a caucus meeting yesterday in which Chris Hipkins was confirmed in the party leader role, and with Kelvin Davis choosing to step back from the position, the deputy role was passed to Carmel Sepuloni.

Carmel Sepuloni and Chris Hipkins. https://www.facebook.com/NZLabourParty

At a time when National, ACT, and NZF have literally zero Pasifika MPs between them, I’m so glad Labour have made Carmel deputy leader. Our first ever MP of Tongan descent, born in Waitara in the Taranaki, and the MP for Kelston where she won by 4,400 votes, even with the Greens candidate gaining almost 4,000 votes.

With the truly dismal lack of diversity from the parties of the right it was bloody good to see a Pacific Island MP from West Auckland elected into such an honoured role. She follows in the footsteps of former deputies like Ardern, King, Parker, Robertson, Cullen, Caygill, Clark, Palmer, and Lange - not bad company really.

Personally I didn’t think there was anything wrong with the leadership prior to the election. Like many on the left I was disappointed by the centrist position taken by Chippy over tax, but for the most part I could see why he did it.

In my opinion Hipkins has a lot more to give in that role, he is an outstanding senior MP and hugely capable in the house. But more than that, more than anything, I think he is a good man and his heart is in the right place.

Unlike the three negotiators on the right, who were having their own meetings yesterday, he doesn’t seem driven by ego but genuinely by a desire to make life better for everyday New Zealanders.

If it had been in the interests of the Labour Party I think Chippy would’ve stepped aside, and put the party first. Some of you will be sceptical perhaps, but think about the circumstances that he took the leadership under. It was a massive hospital pass - Jacinda wasn’t going to win this election, to my mind it took courage to take it on and an intent to put his party and his country ahead of his own career.

The only issue that remained for me was his pre-election position on more progressive tax approaches that would see the wealthiest pay a fairer share of the tax burden. So I was delighted that he immediately said he was starting with a blank piece of paper, policy wise. It’s a pretty obvious thing to do post an election defeat, but it was an important thing to say to many of us who were disappointed with Labour’s tax offering this time.

Fi and I were binge watching an excellent series, Anatomy of a Scandal, on Netflix, but in a break between episodes I watched the first ten minutes of One News to see how they’d present the information to the public. It wasn’t pretty.

It opened promisingly enough as the intro music played, “tonight on One News Chris Hipkins is confirmed as Labour’s leader, promising to start over with a blank page.” But it was about to go rapidly downhill, as they crossed to Jessica Mutch McKay.

The camera panned across an empty car park, blocked off with a bunch of orange cones, to a grim concrete building in the rain, in Lower Hutt. Ok, so far, so depressing. We then saw shots of various Labour MPs in their private caucus meeting seemingly taken through the window Paparazzi style - how exotic.

Jessica began her report by offering her opinion “…the Labour Party licking its wounds after a poor performance at the election.” That’s an interesting choice of words there Jessica that you’re putting in to people’s heads.

Not a poor result at the election, but apparently a poor performance? I’m not in denial about the result, it looks like National might be able to form a government, but I can’t recall the Labour people performing badly. From what I saw they fought hard in the campaign but it was always against them. There is only so much you can do to swim against the tide.

Chippy came out to the podium for a press conference saying warmly “Kia-ora everyone, I’m back”. It was a nice moment but Jessica wasn’t having any of it sniding in her voice over “he’s back despite Labour halving it’s caucus”, then to the Prime Minister “isn’t it time to refresh the leadership?” Chippy to his credit responded simply “no”.

Let’s think about that for a moment. Chris Hipkins has been the Labour leader, and the Prime Minister since late January, in the role for less than a year. So why should they have a refresh?

Besides which they have refreshed the leadership with Carmel promoted to the deputy leader role. Does anyone remember the media asking Bill English, after he lost the 2017 election by a similarly sized majority, that question? I sure as hell don’t.

“Why not?” Jessica demanded, looking seriously pissed off. We’ve all heard of “resting bitch face”, was this a previously unheralded “talking” variety?

Hipkins talked about the need to reflect on the result but he also said out loud what he couldn’t before the election, that “many of the seeds of our defeat were sown well before we became the leadership team”. Which is unarguably true.

Next were Kelvin and Willie together. The former talking about becoming a Grandfather in the last two weeks and having other priorities. It was good humoured, the two members of the Māori caucus having a laugh together, Willie giving the old fella a bit of good natured stick, you know - like regular people do.

Willie Jackson with Kelvin Davis Photo: RNZ.

Jackson spoke of his uncertainty about the term ahead, but was clear that if ACT’s referendum on the Treaty goes ahead then he’ll stick around for as long as it takes to fight that. Good man!

Back to Jessica who wanted to talk about Chippy’s “captain’s calls” during the campaign - the GST off of fruit and veges and ruling out either a CGT or a Wealth tax. She said he was now backtracking on his “policy bonfire”.

I don’t know about you but for me surely any party that loses government has to go back and look at what they offered. Does Jessica just expect Labour to forever run the same policies? That would be a bit weird, does she expect it of other parties too? National have had some real doozies over the years, but I don’t recall them being admonished for changing their offering between elections.

She continued “are you now going to dig through the embers to pick out any of those policies that you shouldn’t have burnt in the first place”. I assume those were the ones that she, and others, had worked so hard to discredit, before they were dropped, like Three Waters.

A policy which reached such a level of fear, misinformation, and outright racism, that Labour had little choice but to dilute it. If Kiwis didn’t want the government to sort out water management then fair enough, why should Labour die in a ditch over it?

Jessica Mutch McKay. Photo: Stuff.

Chris reiterated that they would be starting with a blank page, that three years from now the issues will be different. Just quietly Water Management won’t be, it’ll be a hell of a lot worse if it’s just thrown back at local councils who created the problems in the first place. But do you think Jessica will remind the public that Luxon and Seymour were directly responsible? No, not a chance. Jessica is clearly far too professional for that. By which I mean she knows which side her bread is buttered on.

We moved back to the studio for what has become the obligatory post news item analysis, where Simon Dallow essentially interviews Jessica so she gets a chance to answer the questions. I have no idea why this is present in a news program.

She was offered up an easy “it was big election loss Jess, so why is Chris Hipkins staying on?” To which she obviously replied “because his team backed him as their preferred leader and that’s the news” I’m kidding, of course. What she actually said was…

“Some in the party feel like Chris Hipkins hasn’t really been in that top job long, and there’s also no one obvious to take over from him. There’s also the fact the governments tend not to get voted out in the first term, so Labour could be staring down the barrel of six years warming the opposition benches. So they may not want to replace a leader straight away. Labour is going to have to have a big refresh ahead of the next election, it’s going to have to look through those policies and really look at whether it made the right decisions and especially when it comes to the tax issue.”

Well done Jessica, that’s all very nice analysis and thanks for sharing your opinions but this is actually a news programme. You’re not a guest on the panel on Q&A, you’re supposed to present the events of the day.

Jessica then carried on speculating about how closely Chippy was associated with the previous stance and how difficult that would be for Labour. Cheer up Jessica, you’ve just said he’s got six years to sell some new policies, surely that’s enough? Oh, and wow! That was pretty early to call the next election, you really are making an early start on your next campaign!

It made me wonder why she does it. Is it simply that Jessica cannot stand Labour and becomes furious at their mere mention? That is certainly how it appears.

Is she “just following orders”, is this the editorial position that TVNZ demands she take? Perhaps she’s worried about AI taking over and wants to show she can outdo any hate-bot?

Or is it simply that she believes One News viewers, or at least the ones that the advertisers are interested in, are just desperate to see her rolling her eyes and sticking it to Labour?

It’s all so complicated isn’t it, so many factors at play. If only there was a simple solution, like I don’t know - just reporting the news instead of trying to be it?

Crazy thought eh? But not so long ago that’s what we used to have, a trusted professional who would report events without putting their own spin on them and subjecting us to a post item debrief where they tell people what to think based on their own visibly obvious bias.

Simon manages to do it ok doesn’t he? He is a funny chap that Mr Dallow, just reading out the news and looking a bit awkward when he’s expected to take part in the mandatory banter between clips. When I say awkward the poor fellow looks as if he’s just noticed he has early onset food poisoning and it’s rapidly getting worse.

Simon Dallow: Photo / Sourced from TVNZ.

The thing with Simon Dallow is I’ve got no idea what his political leanings are. He could be a card-carrying communist or a far right closet ACTer for all I know.

He just does his job as a professional news presenter, without it being coloured by his own opinions. You might hope that was pretty much the job description. Maybe he could hand it on to Jessica, it seems to have slipped her mind, for whatever reason.

Someone should tell Jessica to chill with her visible loathing of Labour. It’s going to be a long three years otherwise.