Source: Radio New Zealand
Labour leader Chris Hipkins is promising voters will see a different Labour in 2026 to the party they turned their backs on in 2023.
The last election saw Labour’s six years in government come to an end, and Hipkins returning to the opposition benches just 10 months after becoming prime minister.
Speaking to RNZ for an end of year sit-down interview, Hipkins was keen to cast some distance between the government he led to defeat, and the party he will take to the next election.
“The country’s moved on. The challenges facing the country are different, and so the solutions have got to be different too.”
Settling on a tax
Hipkins said 2025 had been a big year for Labour, and releasing its tax policy had been one of the highlights.
The party finally ended speculation over what kind of tax it would pursue, opting for a capital gains tax over a wealth tax, targeted at investment and commercial property.
The revenue would be ringfenced and go towards three free doctors visits a year for everyone. A Future Fund, free cervical screening, and a GP loan scheme have also rolled off the policy pipeline.
Asked whether Labour had given any consideration to using the tax revenue to go into the general pot or pay down debt, Hipkins said one of the biggest fiscal challenges any incoming government would face after the next election was the escalating cost of healthcare.
“Our national obsession with buying up rental houses isn’t actually helping us to grow the economy, and that needs to change. So targeting a capital gains tax at that area in order to encourage more investment in the productive economy was our first priority,” he said.
“The second thing is, what are we using that money for? We’ve got a crisis in our health system. We’ve got to do more to keep people healthy.”
Paying for those promises relies on there actually being capital gains to tax. Hipkins said economic forecasts suggested house prices would return back to their long-run average.
A different Labour?
Labour’s challenge is to convince voters it is a different Labour to the one they voted out, and Hipkins believed the public was seeing that.
“The Labour Party has been through quite a period of renewal. But also what we’re offering New Zealanders is quite different now. We’re in a very different situation now to the one that we were in two years ago when we went into the 2023 election, and the answers that we offer New Zealanders need to be different as well, and they are.”
A message to the party at this year’s conference was it cannot “say yes” to everything.
That meant, Hipkins said, that any promises Labour would make at the election were ones it knew it could keep.
“We’ve had a series of governments now who have encouraged people to be aspirational for New Zealand and have promised things that have been completely unrealistic. I don’t think we can afford to do that anymore. I think people will lose faith in a whole democratic system if we see politicians continuing to do that, I’m not going to fall into that trap.”
Depending on your pollster of choice, Labour is marginally in front of National or marginally behind. Likewise, Hipkins is either just in front of Christopher Luxon as preferred Prime Minister, or just behind.
All of that is to say it is tight. It means the major parties’ fortunes are looking increasingly reliant on their potential partners, and Hipkins has a problem in the shape of Te Pāti Māori.
The party has never gone into government with Labour, and yet they continue to be grouped together, especially by the coalition.
Te Pāti Māori’s ongoing scandals and internal turmoil have led Hipkins to declare it is a “shambles” and not ready for government, and he wants Labour to win all seven Māori electorates to ensure Te Pāti Māori is not part of the conversation post-election.
The nature of MMP means parties usually need friends, but Hipkins is not resiling from his intention to eliminate Te Pāti Māori.
“Every election is different. There have been a whole variety of different outcomes in MMP elections. Parties have come and gone, and that will continue to be the case.”
He also will not entirely rule out New Zealand First, repeating Labour would signal who it will and will not work with ahead of the election, but with no commitment around a date.
“There’s a lot of water to flow under the bridge. My goal is pretty simple. If you want a change of government, if you want to see good, solid, positive leadership for the country, then vote Labour.”
Some big names have left since the election. Kelvin Davis, Grant Robertson, Andrew Little and David Parker have gone. The likes of Barbara Edmonds, Kieran McAnulty and Willow-Jean Prime have been promoted to the front bench.
“It’s actually a very different Labour lineup now. So if you look at our senior team, our front bench lineup, there’s only, I think, three MPs left there who were there before the election,” Hipkins said.
Despite the same person at the top of the list, Hipkins said it was a “very nice problem to have” that many people were putting their names forward to stand.
“Growing our support means we bring in a whole lot of new talent, and I’m really excited about that. I offer some stability, some continuity, some experience, and you know, I’ve had that brief experience of being prime minister, so I know what to expect.”
A cost-of-living election
Signs point to the economy being rosier by the time of the election.
Business confidence is up, and ASB recently predicted the economy would turn around in 2026.
Hipkins was not concerned that Labour’s attack line on the economy could be running out of runway.
“New Zealanders deserve an economic recovery that benefits all New Zealanders. This government are only focused on benefitting those at the top. New Zealanders need to see a recovery that they all feel, and they’re not feeling that from this government,” he said.
“They don’t think this government cares about them. They don’t think this government’s focused on working New Zealanders who go out there and flog their guts out every day to create a better future for the country. That’s what my focus is.”
The coalition has prosecuted Labour for the “mess” it inherited.
Hipkins conceded that 7.5 percent inflation in 2023 was hurting New Zealand families, and that was reflected in the way they voted. But he said other countries had bounced back quicker since then.
“Why is it that New Zealand has been such an outlier here? It’s because of the decisions of this government, not the previous government. They want to blame everyone for problems that they have created.”
Labour has promised it would repeal the Regulatory Standards Bill, and restore pay equity (although on that point, the party will not say how it will pay for the restoration, which saved the government $1.8 billion a year).
But there have been other cases where Hipkins has said Labour would not repeal legislation it has opposed, saying the public had no appetite for another repeal-and-replace merry-go-round.
That was also partly because Hipkins did not see the point spending the first years of a new term unwinding legislation, adding he was in favour of a four-year term.
An Auckland-focused campaign
Hipkins has previously conceded Labour was not “listening” to Auckland, as its vote plummeted in the Super City.
Previously safe seats like New Lynn and Mt Roskill flipped blue, while turnout in South Auckland strongholds was low.
Since then, Hipkins has spent a lot of his time in Auckland, and is convinced Auckland is now listening in return.
“It’s been a long, slow rebuild for us in Auckland, the first 18 months or so of this Parliamentary term. It was slow going, but we have seen, particularly in the last half of this year, a real increase in our support in Auckland and some energy really building behind our campaign,” he said.
“Momentum matters in campaigns, and we didn’t have the right momentum in the last campaign. That was pretty clear. You know, trending in the polling sort of started going down from July onwards, which meant that we got to that critical turnout period, and the momentum wasn’t with us.
“This is very different now. The momentum is building for Labour. We’ve got a good groundswell of support rebuilding. We’re going to run a very big and very aggressive turnout strategy at the next election.”
Hipkins said he would be spending a lot of time in Auckland on the campaign to ensure that turnout, and had also reflected on his own style of campaigning.
In contrast to the give-everything-a-go Luxon campaign, Hipkins sometimes struggled on the road, relying on a “good to see you”, a handshake and moving on.
Five-and-a-half days laid up with Covid-19 did not help. He exited isolation into the final stretch with renewed vigour, but by then it was too late.
Hipkins said now that he had “had a go” at a campaign, he would be doing things differently.
“I was balancing a lot of things during the last campaign, including the fact that I’d basically only just become prime minister and was trying to lead the country through some really difficult circumstances.
“This time around, I’ve had the opportunity to go through a campaign. I know what to expect. It will be quite different for me. We’ll be doing different things.”
New Zealand has not had an election where the prime minister and the leader of the opposition were the same person as the election before since 1993.
Just as then, the roles were flipped, with former Prime Minister Mike Moore going up against the man that ousted him in 1990, Jim Bolger.
And, just like Moore, Hipkins had not served a full term before being beaten.
“I was campaigning to re-elect a government that I hadn’t been the leader of for most of the time we’d been in government. This time around, I’ll be setting out quite a different vision for the country, quite a different set of priorities. And so it would be my opportunity to stamp my own mark on the campaign and on the next government.”
As for what the public could expect from a full term of a Chris Hipkins-led government, he said Labour would be better prepared.
“Becoming prime minister in the tail end of a parliamentary term is really hard, because you’ve got to both figure out the direction you want to take things in and reset everything that’s already happening.
“Campaigning in my own right for a new government will be quite different to that, because I’ll be able to set out: these are my priorities, this is where I want to lead the country, this is what I want my government to be about.”
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand