Neil Sands
Opposition leader Chris Hipkins says he has learned from past mistakes and will avoid wholesale repeal of coalition policies if Labour wins next year’s election, ending the economically damaging stop-start cycle that incoming leaders typically follow.
Hipkins famously began his tenure as prime minister in 2023 with a “policy bonfire”, ditching or significantly altering predecessor Jacinda Ardern’s positions on everything from climate change to compulsory income insurance.
But in a wide-ranging speech to guests at a breakfast hosted by The Law Association of New Zealand (TLANZ), Hipkins presented himself as a continuity candidate, saying he wanted New Zealanders to find common ground amid political debate that is the most polarised he has ever seen.
Hipkins said New Zealand can no longer undergo extensive government policy changes and public service structural reform every time a new government takes office.
While some coalition policies, such as the controversial pay equity reforms, will clearly be on the chopping block, Hipkins said Labour would work with existing settings on infrastructure and RMA reform, even if they do not fully represent the party’s preferences.
“What we won’t do is repeat the cycle that we’ve seen over the last couple of decades of a change of government leading to everything grinding to a halt for a period of time,” he said. “Where the [coalition] government have made decisions around infrastructure investment, even if they weren’t necessarily our first priority, we will keep going, because stopping and starting all the time is one of the reasons why everything takes so long.
“It’s one of the reasons why we’ve lost 18,000 jobs in building and construction and it’s one of the reasons why highly skilled people working in that sector have been leaving the country.
“Engineers will tell you that they’re losing really talented people because they can’t find work in New Zealand at the moment, but there’s an abundance in Australia.
“No incoming government is going to solve that problem just by repeating this cycle of stopping everything so we’re going to try as much as we can just to keep the momentum going.”
Chris Hipkins with TLANZ President Tony Herring
Reform ‘obsession’
Hipkins also pledged to end constant public service overhauls that he said sapped productivity and created uncertainty.
“New governments like to come in – we did this, as the current government are doing it now – they reorganize everything.
“They reorganize all the government departments and the way different government entities interact with each other. Next to no productivity is gained from that. In fact, the opposite happens. Whilst the restructuring takes place, everyone’s uncertain about where they’re going to sit within the new hierarchy and so everything grinds to a halt.
“I think our obsession with structural reform of government needs to slow right down because constantly reorganizing government isn’t going to lead to better outcomes.”
Hipkins said Labour had a clear focus after learning from mistakes during its time in office from 2017-2023.
“I think we assumed that we could solve every problem all at once, and you can’t,” he said.
“You have to actually prioritise as a government and we were trying to do too many things all at once. We didn’t land things as well as we should have because everything was just too cluttered and too busy. I think that’s a mistake that we made. That we can learn a lot from.”
Among Labour’s broad priorities, Hipkins flagged strong support for research and innovation, citing Ireland’s success nurturing the tech sector.
He also said KiwiSaver should be encouraged to grow, providing a pool of savings similar to that created in Australia, to help fund infrastructure needs.
Hipkins did not go into specifics or address Labour’s tax policies, although he did say Kiwis should stop viewing housing as New Zealand’s primary form of investment, which could hint at a capital gains tax.
“We want to incentivize savings, productive investment, tilt away from speculative housing investment, tackle skill shortages, get the government investing again,” he said.
Kiwi culture wars
Tony Herring and Marie Dyhrberg KC
Hipkins said pay equity will be a major issue at next year’s election “because the government’s basically said to half the population that ‘we think it’s okay to pay you less than the other half’.”
He said Labour planned to reverse the changes passed under urgency in May but could not put a figure on how much funding would be needed, saying the $13 billion over four years cited by the government had been “plucked out of thin air”.
“We will set out before the election exactly what changes to pay equity look like. That includes restoring the rights to pay equity that the current government took away,” he said.
“That doesn’t mean it will be that the law will go back to being exactly as it was before, though. We’re working through that now.”
Hipkins said for many years New Zealand had escaped the worst of the so-called culture wars, but they were now fuelling political divisions in the country.
“I remember when Brexit happened, sitting there [thinking] at least we don’t have that kind of polarising politics in New Zealand. That didn’t last very long. It’s certainly arrived in New Zealand and we have that same degree of polarisation.
“You see it in the debate around the Treaty of Waitangi. You see it in the debate around vaccination. You’ll see it in the debate around gender. A lot of those things that have been very polarising in other countries are now debates here in New Zealand.
“There are political leaders in New Zealand – thankfully, largely not in the two major parties – but there are politicians in New Zealand who desperately want to exploit that for their own political advantage.”
He said New Zealander had shown what could be achieved during the covid-19 pandemic.
“People don’t like to talk about it these days, but New Zealand achieved one of the best covid responses in the world because everybody worked together to achieve it. That sense of unity got shattered about two years later, but actually we should be proud of the fact that, as a country, we were able to come together for that period of time and do something collectively that benefited everybody.
“We need to somehow rekindle that collective spirit, and that means not buying into the divisive culture wars that some are trying to import from overseas. It means finding common ground so that we can move forward together as a country.”
0 Comments