‘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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Next do something more in-depth, like why No Zealand has imported so many hard-right racist voters of colour, many of whom are not even citizens. Hello, perma-NACT. *crickets chirping*
It’s a moot point as Chippy is only seat warming till the Labour top table decide on his replacement, it’s a shallow pool, but he will be replaced by middle of this year….who would put their hand up to be selected is the question?!
Well at least we know how useless Luxon is. He said Chippy would be stabbed by McAnulty at Xmas. And Luxon thinks he has the pulse of the Nation? Just a very select few.
Ahhh that’s ok then Horse cock, let’s bring National/Luxton into Labours leadership problems, in a way you are correct…and National will be Labours problem for at least 9yrs whilst Labour in opposition! (I’m all for Chippy staying as Labour leader, he is the gift that keeps on giving for the right)
Thanks’ to my number 1 hard right fan, Im right, right. 9 years? You really need to take your hand off it, arthritis will set in. I give him 12 months, then he’ll be on the board of directors with some bank, you know how it goes.
Martyn – Serious question…why is Hipkins the leader of Labour?
Hipkins continues to demonstrate why Labour were trounced and why he is not competent to lead the party.The problem Labour has is their lack of an appropriate candidate to replace Chippy and who wants to accept the poisoned chalice anyway.
Grant Robertson is the obvious choice but I suspect he’s biding his time.
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.
Bob the first – Yes, correct.
Bob
Bad call. Grant Robertson would be worse than Jacinda. Besides being a ultra condescending prick, he’s also super smug. He’s as elite as it gets. Worst possible choice for the left.
Don’t always agree with you Nathan but on this you are 100 %
Mike Horse Kings – Thanks
Because parasitic roger douglas, the champion of AO/NZ’s neo-liberalism says so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Douglas
AO/NZ’s politics stopped being democratic once douglas and his confederates took over the helm of Labour in about 1978. How, you might ask? Roger back-stabbed the then prime minister, Labour’s David Lange.
Lange suddenly found himself alone and unsupported by the caucus roger douglas had secretly gathered about himself. Lange told caucus that if they took Lange back, he, Lange, would resign as PM, which he did.
Douglas was a two term labour party finance minister so he’d have been courted by the budding multi-billionaires and the multi-millionaires we must now carry on our backs to this day. Douglas, enabled, constructed, orchestrated and back stabbed to get to where we would never see a sound and fully evolved democratic processes again. The reason why chris hipkins can’t kick-start Labour is two fold.
#1 There is no labour to kick start left, no pun intended, and #2 He wouldn’t fucking dare given the greedy, rich, criminal mastermind elite who never saw the internet coming, mind you, so that you and I and others can write this which can now be debated publicly and instantaneously.
To recap. The Labor we think of and vote for as being Labour is NOT Labour. It’s a mechanism run like a corporation to enhance the profits of the very few at the expense of the many. What’s more, National, the parasitic passengers of which shelter the real privateer villains comprising 14 multi-billionaires, 3118 multi-millionaires with a minimum of $50 million each and let’s not forget the four now foreign owned banks taking billions of dollars out of our economy every year at a rate of $180.00 a second 24/7/365.
Labour, The Greens, the Maori Party, NZ first and david seymour’s festering boil that was the roger douglas and his co-conspirator ACT’s brain fart party ARE ALL THE SAME THING. If the voting public of AO/NZ could somehow come to understand that then we’d be 95% of the way to a curative solution to the virus that’s old Labour’s two term finance ministers treachery. roger douglas, a pig farmer and by farmer I mean he kept poor pigs in tiny cages where they slept on concrete floors, got hosed down and kept pregnant. Quoted from Wikipedia.
“Douglas came into conflict with Prime Minister David Lange, and he eventually resigned as Finance Minister; when Douglas was re-elected to Cabinet in 1989 Lange himself resigned as Prime Minister, signalling the demise of the Labour government. ”
Today, now, this minute? We’re not citizens of our AO/NZ. We’re slaves. We’re literal and actual slaves to powerful money.
I’d go so far as to write that we’re also in far deeper shit than many can imagine in that we’re powerless to manage our future’s. Hipkins. You poor bastard. You have to somehow pretend to be the opposition leader of Labour, the workers political party, which hasn’t existed for just on forty years.
There are only three options for you Hipkins. Continue to be where you are and bank the money. Come clean and create curative chaos which would be awesome. Resign as leader of the husk of the labour party then vanish to enjoy a traitor robbers life.
I wonder if Labour did win the Covid War. Certainly they won the opening battles, but by the end it was perhaps at best a pyrrhic victory, especially in Auckland.
Also it wasn’t just left leaning voters asking “why vote Labour?”. Perhaps even more damaging they completely lost the centre. Those voters that aren’t tribal, and who may be a little better informed then they are often given credit for.
Or maybe as Chippy says, just c’est la vie. He’s stilling getting $300,000 plus whatever perks so why should he care.
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.
Good. Maybe they need to reflect a little bit? They should go and watch ‘In Someone Elses Country’ , the Lange Douglas error.
Start unpacking that. Neoliberalism, and start from there. If they can identify where they’ve gone wrong for the last 40 years and log all of that then they could change things in the future of they can get back into government by, say, 2050?
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.
The problem with that is that the sitting MP are resentful of not being able to choose for themselves and stab the new leader in the back out of spite. That’s the big reason they spent 9 years in opposition last time.
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.
LINO has no social conviction. It follows that they really aren’t worried if they are in oppo or government it’s all the same. Specialy as they’re neolibs as are the Nats. Chippy gets paid mega bucks either way. It’s just a game!
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.
Just consider Hipkins appalling handling of Te Pukenga (the merger of the polytechs). Hundreds of millions flushed down the toilet for nothing.
On that alone he should lose his head as leader. The guy is a walking disaster
Agree Mark, very was said or printed in the MSM regarding the polytech merger, it still owes hundreds of millions in debt and asking for more!
And all you lefties think the media are against the left pfffft
If this debacle was instigated and actioned under National the MSM would be leading with it for weeks….an absolute shambles (seems Chippys mum should be stripped of her role at the education Dept head table also!)
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.
Much more important that someone does an analysis on why voters switched to hard right parties as they are around the world. Yeah sure we can spend a lot of time on why Labour “lost” navel gazing. I will certainly be having my say within the party. But my guess is that by 2026 we will have a lot more to worry about with the escalation of war, the rise of fascist parties, the planet burning. Just watch the Trump video on “God made Trump” to put things in perspective. He may well be President again. My take is it is fear : fear of change ; fear from COVID measures, fear from “others”, fear that crime is around every corner and coming to get you ; downward envy ; and life’s just not it used to be.
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.
Mark he has failed in all his political appointments,the evidence is clear.
He became the leader of Labour by default because at the time no one else wanted the position.
My prediction is Grant Robertson,when he feels the time is right,will take over the leadership.David Parker will be in his camp.
Labour does nevertheless need some new faces.
Good to see you back on deck Bob hope u and all the bloggers had a good break.
I voted National and am pleased to see them in power but a powerful opposition is needed to keep the party in power on course. At the moment Labour is weak and leaderless.
Greens and TPM will tread water keeping their party faithful happy but not achieving a lot except background noise. Agree Robertson would be good but he may have lost the fire to drive National out
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.
Absolutely Andrew and indeed they have already been vilified as the election result showed.
They must hold first place for the worst government in our history with Jacinda and Chippy in a dead heat for worst Prime Minister.
Don’t worry about Chippy. Looks like Golriz just stole the show for the left.
Record spending on housing and healthcare isn’t a “gain”. Better housing and healthcare outcomes would be a gain.
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