Analysis: On the campaign trail with the leaders of National and Labour, TVNZ's Chief Correspondent finds two very different styles.
Chris Hipkins, he told me, has put on five kilos since becoming Prime Minister. Four of them, he estimates, as a result of being fed sausage rolls.
Man.
Meme.
Man.
We are in his office, on the ninth floor of the Beehive. The “his” is finite, of course. We consider who’s been here before him, listing their names backwards, like a pub quiz - Jacinda Ardern, Bill English, John Key, Helen Clark, Jenny Shipley, Jim Bolger, Mike Moore, Geoffrey Palmer, David Lange, and Rob Muldoon, who was probably the first occupant of this echoing, almost featureless place.
Who will be in this office next?
Chris?
Or Chris?
I’ve been on the road with Chris Hipkins and Chris Luxon, off and on, for the past four weeks.
I tell the sausage roll story first to assuage ennui.
I tell the sausage roll story first because I understand the truth of those stunning words Robert Lowell wrote about his parents (and himself) – “It has taken me the time since you died to discover you are as human as I am… if I am.”
On the campaign trail with the leaders of National and Labour, TVNZ's Chief Correspondent finds two very different styles.
This week, I’ve been cutting a television version of my roadie for TVNZ’s Sunday programme. The brilliant (video) editor I’ve been working with is a kind and gentle man. “I quite like them both,” he said, as he watched the footage. He was responding, I think, to the way enough exposure to humanity makes almost everyone look like their shoelaces are undone.
My own reaction to what I’ve seen on the road has been more muddled.
There’s a scene in the TV series, The Bear, in which Carmy delivers a seven minute monologue at an Al-Anon meeting, trying to take the inexplicable and verbalise it into some kind of understanding. This, dear readers, is my version of that.
Prior to the Chris and Chris story, the last time I visited Parliament was to interview Jacinda Ardern.
She was doing her last interviews as a politician, and we spoke in a room at the end of a long corridor in the old Parliament building. The corridor’s walls are lined with photographs of former prime ministers. Until 1997, they are all men. In the 167 years since Henry Sewell, his rumpled waistcoat, his sideburns breaking like waves, we have had 41 Prime Ministers. 38 of them have been male. All of them have been Pākehā.
I think about what the disproportionality of this access to power means.
And how the most toxic anger coming from the shadows is likely to not be targeted at white men.
As much as I gently pushed her, Ardern would not say the hatred she received drove her out, or played any role in her leaving. As I’ve written before, I have to believe her - because she insisted it was true.
The hatred was from a small number of people, yes, but it was terrible. Far beyond political differences and into the fetid bowels of misogyny.
Chris and Chris will be subjected to vitriol, abuse and tribal enmity, but they will not be subjected to that.
And I wonder how we can expect women, and people from ethnically diverse and LGBTQIA+ communities to enter politics when what may await them, if they dare to climb too high, isn’t just criticism and opposition, but a form of flaying.
Our House of Representatives is more representative than it’s ever been, but the people fighting it out for the top job in politics are two straight, white, tertiary educated, cis men, named Chris.
This isn’t a criticism. I come from the same tribe. But it does shape how we view the world.
And I’ve kept seeing that with Chris. And Chris.
Like all of us, they are the product of the way they were taught to see the world.
With Christopher Luxon, it’s about a belief in the capacity to make good.
“I love getting the improvement, right?” he told me. ”And if you think about, you know, I joined the National Party at the lowest low, you know one of our worst election results. And it’s just actually building that back that has been really satisfying. And trying to get the best out of people, is actually what I really get turned on by and get satisfaction with. So building a team, you know, has been really important and just being very focussed on what we’re trying to achieve. And I think that’s what’s motivated me a lot, yeah.”
There’s so much more where that came from. Luxon once worked at McDonald’s, we know this because he’s repeatedly told us, and he dispenses aspirational and motivational homilies with the easy efficiency of a drive-thru. A maxim with those fries? Supersized, baby.
“There’s nothing more important than trying to improve an organisation, a cause, a country, you know? And that’s really what I want to go to work on and solve our problems, and maximise the opportunities. And actually, you know, let's get some momentum back in the place, and some positivity back into the place.”
Luxon makes Saatchi and Saatchi sound like Sylvia Plath.
“You’re just saying words,” I said to him, one day. As he was. And he looked at me like I’d just told a lawn mower off for mowing a lawn.
Still, credit where credit’s due. The National Party was in desperate straits after the 2020 election. In fact, “Party” did not describe them. They were a wake. A dreadful, sober wake, with bad music, not enough food, and mourners who didn’t seem to like each other very much.
And now?
Yes, that’s exactly his point.
I’m not sure if he’s ever mentioned this, but Luxon used to be CEO of Air New Zealand. And as we walked through Aotea Square, one unexpectedly sunny afternoon, he told me how he’d CEO’ed National into shape.
“There were some very direct conversations, put it that way, John.”
Then what?
“We had to be pretty straight up. Do you wanna keep mucking around? And sort of fighting with each other? Or do you actually wanna focus on the New Zealand people, deliver something, get things done for them, and make a better future?”
This is so Luxonesque.
Note the prescriptions around behaviour. No “mucking around”. Note the effortless conflation of the Party’s interests with the country’s. Note that other than “actually” and “deliver”, words Luxon uses like I used to use “marvellous”, there’s not a single word longer than two syllables.
Get - the - message - through.
Get it through.
“And in fairness to all of them”, he concluded, because a CEO first claims the credit for himself (sic) then beneficently shares it around, “they’ve responded incredibly well, and we play it as a team”.
A team!
Wanna make that a combo?!
But let’s return to the phrase, “make a better future”. Because Luxon’s belief in his capacity to do that is as core to brand-Luxon as the LV on the side of an overpriced handbag.
For whom?
On Wednesday, in National’s Caucus Room, Luxon and Nicola Willis announced the party’s tax policy.
We know the details now. The decision to release the cuts as fortnightly figures, so as to make them sound bigger. The sensible politics of making sure the tax “relief” Luxon and Willis themselves get, as the high income earning owners of multiple properties, is no greater than the upper reaches of the “squeezed middle” the pair kept banging on about.
We also know that landlords got a nod. Or a nod and a wink.
And here’s where things turn a bit knotty.
During the media conference, Willis said that since Labour removed interest deductibility as an expense for rental property owners, and increased the bright-line test, meaning gains on residential investment property sold within a decade are taxed, rents had risen $75 a week.
Luxon made the same claim, more explicitly, on RNZ’s Morning Report.
Rents are up. Yes.
But there’s very little evidence that Labour’s policy significantly contributed to that.
And what makes the assertion that it did seem more political than factual is a paper released by Treasury, the Ministry of Housing and the Reserve Bank only last month. “What drives rents in New Zealand?”, the paper asks. “Wage inflation and relative supply and demand of dwellings are the two key drivers of rent inflation”.
Doh, Nicola! Doh, Christopher!
Except if you haven’t stated or inferred that Labour’s policies drove rents up, you can’t state or infer that removing them will bring rents down.
And National did. Repeatedly.
I asked them about this on Wednesday.
Here’s a transcript of that exchange. (NW is Nicola Willis, CL is Chris Luxon, and JC is me.)
JC: So are you really expecting interest deductibility will be passed on? Are you realistically expecting that? You’re expecting, you’re expecting rent cuts?
CL: We’re expecting the Bright Line test from ten years back to two, and the unwinding of interest deductibility to actually put downward pressure on rents.
JC: You’re telling me that landlords are uniformly gonna pass that on?
CL: We’re gonna make sure that they put downward pressure on rents.
JC: How are you gonna make sure?
CL: All I’d say is, hitting you with the counterfactual, is that if you keep it in place, you end up driving rent prices up.
JC: You can’t argue a counterfactual, how are you gonna make sure?
CL: Downward pressure on rents, that’s what we expect to see.
JC: How?
NW: Because there’s a choice here, John. That costs are added on to landlords over the next few years, by Labour, and I’ve spoken to those landlords. Many of them are extremely good to their tenants, they have worked really hard to try to keep rents affordable during a cost of living crisis. But they’re at breaking point.
Do note that last, aching, sentence, so full of heart. Because I’ll return to it.
But wanting to be sure, I asked economist Sam Warburton, noted contrarian, and a man entirely capable of giving all sides of politics a good whack.
What will bring rent prices down, he responded, is supply.
“Labour and National did a wonderful thing a couple of years ago through prohibiting councils from stopping a lot of housing intensification (people being allowed to build up to three storeys by right).
“This has already started to have a big impact on supply. We can see this in Auckland where real rents (rents compared to CPI) have been falling. Supply is becoming more responsive to demand (more elastic).
“This is a great thing. Rents are falling. Homelessness will fall. People will have more choice, not just around rent, but where to live and around quality of housing.”
National, of course, has withdrawn its support for the Medium Density Residential Standards that enabled councils to do this.
Which is confusing and, prima facie, contradictory. And also so at odds with a column Willis wrote as recently as October 2021 that it’s as if that Nicola Willis has been replaced by another Nicola Willis, with completely divergent views.
The column, in Stuff, was headlined: “Nicola Willis: Let's join forces to say yes to more housing.” And it ends with an outburst of advocacy almost Churchillian in its rallying cry: “That’s why National and Labour joined forces to say yes to more housing this week. I invite you to do the same.”
Goodness. If only Willis had read it!
But let’s return to Nicola Willis, the latter, as opposed to Nicola Willis, the former, and the latter’s insistence that landlords are “at breaking point”.
Because if that’s the justification for making life easier for people, National appear to have missed an opportunity.
Wednesday’s tax cuts gave the least amount of money to people on the minimum wage. In a media conference that referred, repeatedly, to “the squeezed middle”, the even more squeezed people below the middle were largely conspicuous by their absence. And the people below minimum wage earners? People on benefits or in beneficiary families? Nothing.
They, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to speculate, may have some experience of being “at breaking point” too.
"National has shown yet again that they don't care at all about those with the least," said Greens Co-Leader James Shaw.
And here’s the thing that keeps gnawing at me, as I watch Luxon’s high-energy aspiration, as I watch his capacity to make people feel seen, as I listen to his dreams of something “better”. If you are that kind of transformative CEO, if you “love getting the improvement”, and “trying to get the best out of people”, and if there’s “nothing more important than trying to improve an organisation, a cause, a country”, then surely the greatest satisfaction would come from lifting up those who are lowest down?
If Luxon can take National’s devastated, internecine, leaking, and unhappy caucus to the brink of government in less than three years, why do his meaningful ambitions for broader transformation so often appear to go no lower than “the squeezed middle”?
All those powerful words. All that aspiration.
Interestingly, while my assessment of National’s tax policy is that it’s fairly pro-forma political opportunism, aimed solely at winning an election, not persuasively funded, almost certainly inflationary, and lacking the vision, morality and courage to direct itself at the people who need it most, that’s a bouquet compared to Matthew Hooton’s take on it.
Writing in the Herald, late on Friday, Hooton called it a “cynical con”, and “grossly irresponsible”. He continues: “It is certain to fuel higher inflation, higher interest rates and lock in a structural fiscal deficit for a generation.”
Still, at least we’ll have National’s leadership on climate change.
(That’s a stupid joke, and I unreservedly apologise.)
Chris Hipkins, on the other hand, approaches the campaign trail with the prudence of a man who has a very full piggy bank but doesn’t want to break it. He’s had it so long now that many of the coins it contains are no longer legal tender. But, you know, don’t get carried away.
On the road his campaign strategy is the solidarity of shared silence. As Luxon greets everyone like he went to school with them, and they once had a crazy adventure in which they ate hotdogs and nearly got lost, Hipkins stands beside people and looks in the same direction. He campaigns like he mistook the Blondie album Parallel Lines for an instruction.
This is endearing when you see it often enough. It’s so thoroughly ordinary. It’s almost as if he’s shy. But if people ever see Chris Luxon and Chris Hipkins, in the flesh, on the same day, they may conclude the former was on energy drinks and the latter was on valerian tea. It does seem only a matter of time before the PM starts turning up in his jammies.
None of that matters if you’re carrying a suitcase full of policy. Helen Clark occasionally campaigned with the enthusiasm of someone forced out of their house while the fumigators were in - and she won three terms. But Labour’s suitcase still needs filling.
Yesterday’s announcement of free dental care for under 30-year-olds feels like a start. At least it felt like a Labour policy. (Which is to say, a more focused and diluted version of something already on offer from the Greens.) And it almost felt urgent. Like someone, somewhere, has realised it’s time to look like they give a damn.
The other day I raised this with the PM. And he pointed out the extent to which the minimum wage and benefits have risen during Labour’s six years in office. Yes, fair point. The minimum hourly wage was $15.75 in 2017. It’s $22.70 now.
But, and I’ve written about this, both recently and at length, Labour had the mandate and the opportunity to be truly transformative, and they haven’t been. Chris Hipkins now has added the motivation of urgency and electoral peril.
The clock is ticking. It’s just that Labour appear to have opted for a well-priced digital timepiece, and to have set it on silent mode.
As we were filming with Hipkins, we joined him and Grant Robertson as they were heading out, in the PM’s official van, to a FIFA World Cup game. The two men are clearly close friends. And they laughed at memories of their indoor netball team, basking in half-glory as old mates do in the years afterwards, when youth turns to legend.
But the measure of Robertson’s friendship may also be his loyalty.
Labour did have a tax plan. A “tax switch”, with tax cuts for the lowest income levels, being funded by a “wealth tax” on the very wealthiest.
The PM rejected it. And in doing so, he lost his Revenue Minister David Parker, he left open ground for National to raid, and he eschewed the opportunity for even the possibility of the kind of leadership that would have signalled Labour remembered what they’d stood for in 2017, when they described growing inequality as a moral and political failure - and people believed them.
"I'm confirming today that under a government I lead there will be no wealth or capital gains tax after the election. End of story," Hipkins said, in July.
Good Lord.
As Bernard Hickey wrote at the time: “The future of Aotearoa’s political economy will now remain frozen in its stagnant, unequal, unjust, unproductive and unhealthy state for the foreseeable future. That’s what our leaders, and ultimately the only voters that matter, have decided.”
Back on the campaign trail, at Waitara High School, a student called Jesse Cuthbert walked quietly to the front of the assembled senior students, and asked Hipkins what he was going to do about homelessness.
Jesse told me he’d asked the PM that question because, “I found two girls outside of New World. And seeing them and their kids, like bad condition and everything, I felt so bad for them. They ended up asking me for a dollar, I had no dollar on me.”
Do we have a dollar on us?
“So what’s the point of Labour again?” Bernard Hickey asked, in that article from July.
Maybe Labour will answer that in the next six weeks.
Maybe National will provide an alternative more meaningful than, “Look! Here! We’re not Labour! And hey, all you floating voters, here’s a little bit of money!”
As I wrote in July, there appears to be a growing constituency drifting away from the main parties’ variations on vanilla centrism. (Over the next few weeks, I’ll join the Greens, Act and Te Pāti Māori on the campaign trail.)
But the contest for Prime Minister remains Chris v. Chris. And as our editor decided, after watching hours of footage of them, they’re human, with all that entails. Good company, in a high-volume v low-volume kind of way. The Chris who loses will not lie about the result, will not encourage his supporters to storm Parliament, and will behave in a fashion that upholds something larger than any one person, something flawed but sacred - democracy.
But are they politically courageous ones?
And “better”?
For whom?
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