‘Sometimes you lose’: Labour leader Chris Hipkins reflects on 2023
Two months on from Labour’s election-night shellacking, leader Chris Hipkins still cannot pinpoint what the party could have done differently during the campaign to win.
It makes the task of rebuilding and repositioning for 2026 all the more difficult as Labour readjusts to opposition and a diminished caucus of just 34 MPs.
Speaking to RNZ in Parliament’s final week this year, Hipkins said one of the few advantages of opposition was the extra time to reflect. But his reflections on the campaign thus far do not appear to have produced much in the way of meaningful lessons.
“Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose,” Hipkins said. “The tide comes in and the tide goes out.”
Ummmm.
What?
“Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, the tide comes in and the tide goes out.”
Ummmm.
Sure, but not having any meaningful election policy platform and no vision didn’t help either eh Chippy?
Labour won the Covid war but lost the Covid peace because their incrementalism only wanted to rebuild to the existing inequality rather than expand and grow beyond that!
We were promised transformative, what we got was less left wing than the British Tory Party!
The current in-house review of why Labour lost will of course be a whitewash with zero credibility but it will provide Labour with a fig-leaf defence to avoid the actual reasons they lost and we shouldn’t allow them to get away with that.
Look, I’m not saying there wen’t some gains over the last 6 years: Free school lunches, trust tax, new top income rate, free prescriptions, most state houses in 50 years, record investment in housing, healthcare and investment, regulate property managers, clean car discount, apprenticeship scheme, benefits to wages, FPAs – all great first steps, but after 6 years of ‘first good steps’, you realised you were just jogging on the spot!
Labour are over run by the Professional Managerial Class, they see the solution as better bureaucratic structures rather than an upgrade of the Capacity of the State and so spent 6 years recreating bureaucratic structures without the necessary upgrade of capacity.
Labour refused to explain what the hell 3 Waters or Co-governance meant because Jacinda hated conflict (her Cabinet meetings were nicknamed ‘The Good Ship Lollypop’ because she wouldn’t tolerate any negativity) and wouldn’t engage on co-governance or 3 Waters which allowed astroturf dark money to take over the debate and manufacture it into an existential race issue!
Fundamentally Labour needed to tax the rich to pay for the social infrastructure we needed upgrading, but because Labour at heart are intellectual cowards, they refused to engage in that, which left voters asking, ‘why bother voting for Labour’.
Why indeed.
What was the point of Bread and Butter politics if no one could afford the Bread or the Butter?
GST off my banana only made me feel Labour didn’t understand how acute the cost of living crisis was for many of their own supporters!
That this all seems to be news to Chippy is terrifying!
With the Left over run by identity politic activists and woke middle class dogma, Chippy’s inability to understand how disrupted the political culture is and why class Left economic universals funded by taxing the uber wealthy is the solution all combine to suggest he’ll cost us the 2026 election as well!
Chippy doesn’t know what the problem is and has no solutions! The damage this hard right racist Government is about to cause the vast number of Kiwis demands a political Left with actual answers to the real problems.
Labour either understand this quickly or squander another 3 years in Opposition.
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When the tide comes in, it is not because of anything I have done. When the tide goes out, it is not because anything I have failed to do. My only question: “Why doesn’t someone pay me $471,049 a year to watch the tide come in and and the tide go out?”
He’s not confused by the seven million shortfall in his campaign fund.
Jacinda was installed via the party rules, without out a membership vote, as was Chris Hipkins, per the rules again. This means Fraser House and senior officials and Caucus run NZ Labour not the membership at large.
Until the right wing of NZ Parliamentary Labour is defeated the wider right wing will not be defeated.
While Chippy obviously lives in a bubble you would have thought that the remaining Labour MPs had enough intelligence between them to recognise their failure but it seems that those rats all want to stay on the sinking ship. Even Dave Armstrong on Stuff came to the same conclusion as you which makes the Labour team look clueless.
It’s quite simple, Stop pandering to the minorities and alienating the majority.
To win an election you need to attract the support of the conservative, the bigoted and the racists.
That’s it. Forget the distractions, hold your nose and start looking for the people you’ve lost, the ordinary NZders who actually do the work. Same applies to TPM and the Greens.
Chris Hipkins, from this point on, will be a mill-stone. He reminds everyone of their utter failure to get people enthused. He rejected so many ideas which may have attracted votes and failed to refute the nonsense being spouted by the right.
Jacinda was a blip. We won’t see her like again for decades.
We need someone who isn’t half celebrity and has rock-solid working-class values, not the university debating team on a day-trip to the real world.
The holidays are over. Time for some heavy soul-searching for Labour.
Do not fob us off with Hipkins for 6 months. That won’t do.
Cut your losses and get on with it.
Robertson may be biding his time, so whose side is he on? His own, or New Zealand’s? Do not leave it too late Grant. If it’s going to be you, get cracking.
Yes, bob the first he is in waiting (Robertson), but this government will be gone after 3 years so he needs to make sure he is ready to roll.
Look if fucken France can put a 34-year-old gay PM then so can we, Roberston will be an excellent PM he knows the ropes. I would like to see him step up, in the meantime leave Chippy there we need experienced opposition to question all the lies and bullshit coming out of the new government’s mouths.
This is long but we need to think on different lines to the past, but what? We aren’t getting anywhere repeating all that has already been said, and ignored. New vision, new energy, more practical outcomes to aim for, not the heights. Even Mt Cook has lost some of its height, stone can’t withstand change, and neither can we. It is coming, it is here, have we got gumption to handle it. Or are we just chewing on gum … not able to walk and chew gum at the same time! Huh?
We need help in changing the direction of those carrying us further towards godless New Zealand/Aotearoa. The story of the rise of Wales from a low and also The Morriston Orpheus Choir could be a guide for us.
https://www.morristonorpheus.com/75-years-of-song-a-brief-history-of-the-morriston-orpheus-choir
Could we get enough true hearts and practical bodies as the Welsh have done (800 men) to produce this vid? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3K1FHXi35c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elgSPq6nJ6c with Tom Jones
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZuN7FnDFEc Let It Be Me
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssT9m1X8tyM Bread of Heaven – Treorchy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_czUsh-I7k My Way
And keep the words of this thoughtful poem to the fore in our heads (and then we might have to ask certain people in government, parliament and administration to move on.):
Prayer – by Dr Grahame Davies –
Spirit, use me today,
not in some miracle
that would make others marvel
and make me proud…
But in the mundane miracles
of honesty and truth
that keep the sky from falling…
https://serenbooks.wordpress.com/2022/09/09/
friday-poem-prayer-by-grahame-davies/
The point is togetherness and commitment to good outcomes for the whole, not just pursuing money and pleasant personal outcomes. We need to gather together with people who care about each other and enabling good useful satisfying happy lives so we can face the difficult future with a workable moral society We don’t need obsessed sociopaths or vehement acolytes of the latest fraternity trained in the UK the USA Australia or Asia doing our guiding, but thinking people who understand the good that can be learned from others and utilised, to manage our own way within our present conditions going for better.
Toto might say something for us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTQbiNvZqaY
Labour will ultimately lose the “Covid war” because there will be a Royal Commission into the response to the pandemic, with the coalition setting the terms of reference.
Once all the facts come out, Labour will be widely vilified for its incompetence and corruption.
How can we ever get a practical government when there are always people like yourself Andrew holding yourself out to be qualified to vilify whatever move that doesn’t favour or agree with the preferences of you or your kind?
They are already, and without a trace of fact involved. They need to sue for libel every loud-mouthed conspiracy theorist out there. Let them learn, as Trump and Faux news has learned, that lying your ass off is expensive. God knows they could use the funds.
The purpose of the New Labour movement is to make the right look good.The powers that be use their time in power to erode our rights, waste our money and poison the well of real social democracy. They’re not allowed to actually do anything useful* – the most they are allowed to be is ‘not the other guys’, i.e. shite lite.
Then once people are fed up with their inactivity and woke thought policing they do what they were always meant to do – vote shite max back in.
Make either Keiran or Parker the leader
It’s pretty fucking simple.
Labour is the party of change and National is the party of the status quo. It has always been this way and it makes it far harder to govern as Labour than National.
If you’re the party of change then you have to equip yourself with the capability to implement change. Labour failed badly on this score. Too much “talk” not enough “do” with a senior leadership team that isn’t selected by their ability to dance the wokey tokey.
Labour needs to demonstrate to the country that they can confidently implement a policy platform until then they’re pissing in the wind.
Thanks
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