Candidate Kōrero: Prime Minister Chris Hipkins (Labour Party)

Candidate Kōrero: Prime Minister Chris Hipkins

Labour Party

Words by Zoe Mills (they/she) and Maia Ingoe (she/her)

We met the Prime Minister at his office in the Beehive—Chippy was 15 minutes late, largely due to a tray of sausage rolls being wheeled into his office (Fair enough).

“Hi, I’m Chris,” the PM introduced himself, chipper if not a bit clammy, fresh from National’s tax policy announcement (and Labour’s worst polling results since 2017, dipping into the 20s). We took a seat on one of the sofas in his Beehive office and wasted no time getting stuck in.

Chippy’s Student Advocacy Days

Chippy was VUWSA president in 2000 and 2001, where he was known for proposing considerably leftist policies, focused on tertiary education, student wellbeing, and lowering the price of a pint at the Hunter Lounge. Chris asserts that he’s “stayed true to my roots”, but in 2023, his “field of vision is wider”.

“My values are still exactly the same, my ideals around education are still the same. But I have a slightly more expansive view of [education].”

We’d brought in a selection of quotes from Hipkins’ VUWSA days, published in his regular Salient columns. In 2000, Hipkins said, “It has become obvious and widely accepted that the level of government support for tertiary education in New Zealand is woefully inadequate [...] it's time for them to put their money where their mouths are and give tertiary institutions sufficient funding to allow them to achieve their goals.”

Hipkins says he maintains that view, and has a track record of improving tertiary funding in Government. “I’m not satisfied with the levels of funding that we've got actually. Even just in the last couple of months, we've put in an additional injection of funding into tertiary education to boost funding rates as a result of concerns at institutions like Victoria University.”

Support for Students

Back in 2001, Hipkins said a universal student allowance was achievable within a 10-year period; currently, only 12% of students are eligible to access student allowance. He was quick to blame reductions in tax, seemingly pointing the finger at National’s tax plan for tertiary education.

“I am of the view that tax cuts reduce the available funding for things like quality tertiary education, which is why we're not campaigning on a program of tax cuts. The more we see government revenue reduced through things like tax cuts, the less flexibility there is, the less options there are in the future to do more for education, for health, for other public services.”

We asked Hipkins if he would support VUWSA’s Study Wage for All campaign, which urges for a $385 universal allowance. He neither confirmed nor denied his party’s support for the campaign, admitting, “That's not something that I think we could credibly be offering at this point.”

Hipkins credits the current “tight financial environment where every additional dollar of government spending is getting more and more difficult to achieve. Over time, I'll always continue to push for more support for tertiary students.”

It’s a pattern throughout our conversation: Hipkins supports a lot of ideas but fails to commit to them.

However, Hipkins did manage to confirm that half price transport fares for under 25s would “absolutely” continue under a Labour Government. He quickly withdrew this certainty when asked about extending free fares to under 25’s. “In time, if it was affordable, you know, there might be ways, it might not be all under 25’s… there’s more targeted stuff that we could do.”

Tertiary

Hipkins has confirmed that first year fees free would continue under a Labour Government, but remains uncertain as to whether additional free years would be pursued. “I don't think that we'll be adding more years to that in the foreseeable future, just because [...] if we were going to put more money into tertiary education, I'm not sure that's the first place that we would go.”

Hipkins remained sensibly mild throughout our chat, only making a handful of digs at the opposition. He argued that you couldn’t guarantee first year free under a National Government, because ACT “have been pretty clear they want National to be more radical around the cuts that they’re making” and that first year free will be “first on the chopping block.”

When asked about Labour’s long-term plan for tertiary education, Chris said that most universities are doing through a “restructuring exercise” at the moment… and pointed to how he’s changed the funding model for tertiary education, referring to the education minister’s Tertiary Funding Model.

Housing

Like almost every politician we’ve spoken to, Hipkins aims to solve the housing crisis through the revolutionary idea of Building More Houses.

We asked Hipkins how the government will support the creation of housing in the CBD that is accessible for students and low income earners. He noted changes Labour made by loosening building laws so that buildings of up to three stories high would not need resource consents, a change also supported by National. But, “fundamentally, it's a supply and demand problem, there's more demand than there is supply”.

He admitted that KiwiBuild, building around 3000 houses, didn’t achieve the success it aimed for, but that his government’s work in both improving private sector builds and building more state houses has been successful. “We're building more state houses than any government since the 1950s. And again, that helps with the rental affordability issue because the more state houses there are the more affordable rental becomes overall within the market.” But even after two terms in government, Hipkins says “we’ve just got a lot of catching up to do”.

Hipkins thinks that mechanisms such as rent freezes or caps would be ineffective for a New Zealand context. “It's more likely to result in fewer rentals being available in the first place, which would mean that the price of those rentals would probably actually go up rather than down.” He notes the yearly rent rise limitation introduced by Labour as something that does work, “so landlords can't keep hiking up the rent”.

While Labour introduced the Healthy Homes Standards, they don’t have a policy around strengthening enforcement or compliance. “We're always looking at how we introduced the standards for a reason, because we do think landlords should have to comply with them.”

When pushed, Hipkins said there will be “elements” in their housing policy to address compliance. At the time of writing, Labour’s housing policy had not been announced.

The Student’s Choice

“Fundamentally, this election is about a choice. It's a choice between a government that wants to cut government support through cutting taxes, or a government that wants to continue to increase it. And the Labour Party stands firmly on the side of increasing tertiary student support.”

However, it seems that Hipkins is unclear of what tertiary student support actually looks like.

Our interview solidified all that we’d read in the media about his campaign: he seemed slightly unmotivated and unenergetic. The pragmatic Covid-19 Response Minister who led us through the pandemic was now staring down the barrel of an election where he just couldn’t quite seem to grasp voters in the way that 2017-2020 Jacinda-mania did.

Listen to our full interview with Chris on Salient podcasts!