Voting On The Vibe: Hipkins Explains Labour’s Loss.

Beltway Boy: Chris Hipkins is a Wellingtonian: important because it not only explains his extraordinary tone-deafness as a politician, but also accounts for his talents as a plotter and schemer. “Chippie” has the mind and style of a bureaucrat. It’s why he was able to climb so high. Unfortunately, he also possesses the imagination of a bureaucrat, which is why he fell so low.

“TWEE.” That was the word my father used to describe the Wellingtonians of 54 years ago. It was, he said, a Wellington word, entirely unfamiliar to a person born and bred in the South Island. It’s novelty notwithstanding, my father was rather taken with the expression. It suited the professional public servants he rubbed shoulders with every day, capturing the lofty tone of their communications and the distance these opened up between themselves and ordinary mortals. Perhaps the best way to define “Twee” was by its antonyms: it wasn’t earthy, or direct, or coarse. Least of all, was “Twee” common. Coming from a farming background, the word’s connotations of high-falutin cliquishness did not sit well with my father’s egalitarian principles. There was, however, no denying its effectiveness as an adjective.

It would seem that Wellingtonians have not changed much these past 50 years. They are still defined by their conviction that, as citizens of the nation’s capital, the place where decisions are made, they inhabit an altogether superior social plane to the rest of the population. To be a Wellingtonian is to be well-connected and “in the know”. That deliberate distancing from the rest of the country, which my father noted with concern way back in the late-1960s, is still there.

Oh, and there’s one more important thing to note about Wellingtonians. They are not confined within the boundaries of Wellington City. To be a Wellingtonian means living anywhere south of the Remutaka Ranges. (Or, these days, maybe Waikanae and Martinborough?). In select niches of the Hutt Valley – Woburn, Heretaunga – one can still very easily run into senior public servants at the local dairy, or sit beside them on the electric “units” that still carry both the Twee and the un-Twee into the echoing spaces of Wellington Railway Station.

All of which contributes to the important political fact the Chris Hipkins is a Wellingtonian. Important because it not only explains his extraordinary tone-deafness as a politician, but also accounts for his talents as a plotter and schemer. “Chippie” has the mind and style of a bureaucrat. It’s why he was able to climb so high. Unfortunately, he also possesses the imagination of a bureaucrat, which is why he fell so low.

Just how low was made clear last week in a series of interviews with political journalists. It is highly unlikely that Hipkins understood how much he was giving away in these discussions. It is much more likely that he believed himself to be demonstrating his political reliability. And, to a lot of high-ranking, high-earning Wellingtonians, that’s probably how he came across. As someone who knows how the whole intricate mechanism of power operates. As a practical politician: someone not to be blown off-course by the fever-dreams of political extremism. As a safe pair of hands.

Unfortunately for Hipkins (and his Wellington apparatchik-dominated Labour Party), most New Zealanders do not live south of the Remutakas and north of Cook Strait. In the months leading up to the General Election, what they saw did not at all resemble the capital city cognoscenti’s’ solid political operator. The man they saw, his red hair notwithstanding, looked alarmingly like a grey and uninspiring Wellington bureaucrat. A Prime Minister already weary of the job which, in his heart-of-hearts, he had always known would be the death of his career.

To the people who live south of the Brynderwyn Ranges and north of the Bombay Hills, however, Chippie was the Minister who’d kept them locked-down for week after week after week, while their businesses faltered and the mental health of their family and friends deteriorated. When, almost overnight, Chippie’s predecessor ceased to be the pandemic-defying fairy princess, and became, instead, Covid’s wicked queen. As the handling of the pandemic shifted, without adequate explanation, from “elimination” to “vaccine mandates” to “let her rip”. While Chippie stood there, at “the podium of truth”, telling stir-crazy Aucklanders stories that kept changing.

Being a Wellingtonian made it harder for Hipkins to grasp just how hated the Sixth Labour Government’s post-2020 handling of the Covid Pandemic had made it in Auckland. Jacinda Ardern, who had represented the City as the MP for Mt Albert since March 2017, could not make that excuse. Although, remaining in Wellington for pretty much the entire Auckland Lockdown undoubtedly helped.

“I didn’t take the election result personally”, Hipkins told the NZ Herald’s Audrey Young, “I think it was a reflection of the fact New Zealanders have had a tough time with Covid and cost of living and a whole lot of other things and were just looking for something different.”

Something different? Yeah, that’s fair. Something very different from the Sixth Labour Government!

Hipkins disputes the suggestion that the emphatic nature of the country’s rejection of Labour was because he’d made it very clear that he and his government would not be following the Labour Party’s electoral base on its journey to the Left.

“People don’t vote on a left-right continuum”, says Hipkins. “They vote on the vibe of the campaign. I probably learned that a lot more in this campaign than I have before because leading it, you definitely get a much greater sense of the vibe of the campaign.”

We’ll come back to this extraordinary invocation of New Age political science: to Hipkins’ lame explanation that Labour’s catastrophic defeat “wasn’t necessarily policy-driven”, but was “just how people were feeling.”

The precise nature of those “feelings” is entirely absent from Hipkins’ analysis. (As well, evidently, from the analysis of his caucus colleagues, since they opted to re-elect Hipkins as their leader unopposed – no one even daring to test the temperature of Labour’s ideological waters by offering the Caucus an alternative candidate.) That huge policy failures in some areas of government activity (housing), offset by frightening successes in others (co-governance), might have engendered a “feeling” that the contradictions within Labour’s programme had reached insuperable proportions, does not appear to have occurred to Hipkins, or his caucus.

That he was not required to face an alternative candidate raises the disturbing idea that within the Labour Caucus (and quite possibly across the entire party organisation) there are no alternative ideas or plans. Hipkins appeared to confirm this in the interview he gave to Newsroom journalist, Jo Moir, where he discounted the possibility of a recrudescence of Labour’s factional caucus infighting (which Hipkins led) between 2008 and 2017:

“I think some of the preconditions for that is having people with fundamental policy differences in your team, and we don’t really have that. There are some issues around tax that we’ll work through but it’s not fundamental – people might have a different view on wealth tax and a capital gains tax, but these aren’t major fundamental philosophical differences in approach.

“Then you also have to have burning ambition, people who are just willing to claw each other’s eyes out, and we don’t have that either.”

Nothing could signal a more comprehensive victory for the Wellingtonian mindset than this ideological and psychological retreat from politics as a contest of ideas and a battle to see whose ideas are implemented. Labour has ceased to be a political party by any definition that would have made sense to Mickey Savage or Norman Kirk. It represents no massive social surges (with the exception, perhaps, of Māori tribalism) or even thwarted provincial ambitions, being perfectly content in its role as the alternative executor of elite interests. Happy always to step back into office whenever the tide of public opinion turns. Whenever the vibe is right.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 11 December 2023.