After his first cabinet meeting as top dog, Chris ‘Chippy’ Hipkins gave his first speech from the podium as Prime Minister. Since his election as Labour leader he has been clear that the government’s agenda would be pared back to “bread and butter issues”. So the decision to can the RNZ-TVNZ merger, re-think Three Waters and kick the hate speech reforms, bio-fuels mandate and social insurance scheme down the road was largely anticipated by commentators. Cabinet was hardly going to revolt against the wishes of the new boss who’s enjoying a pretty good honeymoon.
So we got the big reset. This wasn’t philosophical or ideological, it wasn’t about left or right or vision or big new ideas. It was Survivor politics, removing the least popular from the island. A bunch of policies were told “the tribe has spoken” not because they weren’t good policies, but because they weren’t vote-winning policies.
But what precisely did he say in today’s press conference and how might his (rather pallid) comments be interpreted? Hipkins says New Zealanders need to get to know him better before the October election, so here’s a rough translation of Chipp-ese into plain English.
From the start of the press conference Hipkins made his most blatant attempt yet to distance himself from the Ardern era. Subext: “Whatever National says, I’m not her”.
“I’ve made it clear that the govt is doing too much too fast and we’d reassess our priorities and refocus on that new direction”.
Nothing like an eight point poll drop in less than a year to make a “new direction” seem pretty appealing, right? That new direction is really about searching the map for a winning direction. I’m sure when Hipkins & co ‘reassessed priorities’ they decided the priority was not losing.
“There’s a clear need for further support for public media but it needs to be at a lower cost and without the need for significant structural change… RNZ will be provided with additional funding to secure its financial stability and to strengthen its role in public media. New Zealand on Air will also receive additional funding to support public media content that will be accessible across a range of different platforms.”
For all the pressures on modern mainstream media and the jeopardy they bring to modern democracies, voters simply hadn’t bought what Willie Jackson, and Kris Faafoi before him, were selling. Hipkins is giving up on a fight swing voters were never going to swing their vote on. “Additional funding” for New Zealand on Air really means giving back some of the money Labour took off it last year. Interestingly, he simply didn’t mention TVNZ.
“Social insurance will not proceed as proposed. With families and businesses under pressure it is not the time to pursue this change and put additional costs on them in this term.”
If you don’t think politics can be brutal, imagine how Hipkins’ good, loyal mate Grant Robertson must have felt about his baby, his key policy legacy, getting kicked so far down the road you could mistake it for a pebble. Robertson will be furious he’s been asked (nay, told) to sacrifice this one. But hey, the subtext here is “You could have had the big job Grant and had the policy to go with it. But you didn’t want it enough, so this is the price of politics”. It’s telling that in this axing and the axing of the biofuel mandate, Hipkins really wanted us to hear how much he really, truly cares about business costs. Because in a few minutes he was about to not care very much about business costs at all.
“We hear from a lot of people these are good ideas… but these are not the times to press ahead with them.”
This is what you say to those who actually liked the ideas you’ve just canned. It’s a plea, “don’t hate us”, a way of saying some of these could come back if you will only re-elect us.
“The minimum wage is going to increase by $1.50 per hour to $22.70 per hour”
So a few minutes ago he was stressing how he didn’t want to place additional costs on business. Now he’s, um, placing additional costs on business. Politics is a game of give-and-take after all. That includes giving something to your base. Keeping the votes you’ve got is almost as important as winning over new votes, And now that he’s auctioned his sunnies and cap, he’s got to do something to remind people he’s the working class boy from the Hutt, right? That the party of Ardern hasn’t lost all its kindness.
“[On Three Waters] We’ll work through those options carefully and that is likely to take a few more weeks.”
What does that mean in Chipp-ese:?Stalemate. For now. Cabinet still doesn’t have consensus on what to do next with this most snake-like of policies (slippery and likely to bite you). The likely interpretation of that sentence is “the Maori caucus hate this and are kicking up no end”.
“These are the first and most significant set of decisions we’re taking to refocus the government’s agenda.”
In case you missed it, this is the line that highlights that he’s listening. Really listening. As in, ‘it’s an election year and he’s willing to do what it takes’. These are the first, but if the polls don’t shift enough and the people want more, hey, we’re willing to do more.
And if you’re sceptical about that interpretation, he more or less repeated it.
“All ministers will continue to review their work programmes to see if there’s further tightening work that we can do.”
In other words, if you don’t like this, we can give you more. Less. Whatever you want! There’s still nine months to go until election day and in case you missed it, this government really, really wants you to like it.