Election 2023: On the campaign trail, Chris Hipkins given hard word on tax and migration

Chris Hipkins during his visit to a class of refugees learning English in Wellington. Photo / Thomas Coughlan

Labour leader Chris Hipkins was given the hard word while out campaigning in Wellington today, with a classroom of refugees asking him to fix the broken family reunification process and a business owner warning income taxes were too high.

Friday was Hipkins’ third day this week in Wellington, campaigning in electorates Labour holds with strong majorities. Luxon too spent time in strongly blue electorates - Southland and Tauranga - this week.

Hipkins began Friday early at a Wellington Chamber of Commerce breakfast with business leaders, before having morning tea with a class of refugees learning English, and then winding up at a repair shop for ships - including the Cook Strait ferries - in the electorate of Ōhāriu.

It was a tightly packed schedule for Hipkins and, after a gruelling week, he failed to fire at the chamber breakfast, leaving the audience unmoved.

The speech was an amalgamation of two previous business speeches delivered that week and Hipkins himself seemed bored delivering it.

Fortunately, Hipkins was still able to laugh at himself, having a good chuckle at repeatedly being unable to say the word “ethicist”.

“Ethic… ethic… Oh, I can’t pronounce it - the people who focus on ethics,” he laughed. His audience laughed too - a previous speaker had made the same gag after stumbling over the word “digitisation”.

His next stop was visiting the class of refugees. Hipkins was accompanied by the electorate’s incumbent MP Grant Robertson, his replacement as Labour candidate in the seat Ibrahim Omer, and Fleur Fitzsimons.

Coursework open on the tables showed Hipkins had been a topic discussed in language class, including his reputation as the “minister for memes” and passion for sausage rolls.

Hipkins’ talent deficit in the small talk department has been a feature of the first week of the campaign and it was on display here. He launched into a lengthy spiel about constitutional monarchy, his role as the head of government and the distinction between the Governor-General as head of state.

“The Governor-General is the overall head of government for New Zealand,” Hipkins said, slightly incorrectly - he is actually the head of government, the Governor-General is head of state.

“I report to the Governor-General as the head of the elected government,” he said. Soporific stuff.

Prime Minister Chris Hipkins met "Chico" the dog. Photo / Thomas Coughlan

Thankfully Omer, who himself came to New Zealand as a refugee, livened the mood with an uplifting speech and a message that the class may one day become Parliamentarians themselves.

Robertson also managed to get a chuckle out of the room with a gag about Omer’s wise decision to settle in Wellington rather than Auckland.

Hipkins took questions from the floor, with Omer often translating.

Omer, currently a list MP, has been Labour’s pointman on refugee issues, treating New Zealand’s population of refugees as its own electorate and advocating on their behalf. He appeared to already be aware of most of the complaints raised by the class, which included substandard accommodation, with large families crammed into small houses, and the difficulty some were having using the “family reunification” process to bring relatives into the country.

Omer had some empathy for this. He himself is currently trying to use the family reunification category to bring his brother into the country.

Labour has reopened the “family reunification” pathway and in 2020 doubled the number of people who could come to New Zealand under the scheme from 300 to 600.

The challenge is the two-tier system. Tier one is intended to help refugees who have no family in New Zealand, acting as a fast track to bring people into the country.

But it puts pressure on people already here to avoid setting down roots and getting into a relationship lest they become ineligible in that category and shunted into tier two, where the process is even slower.

Some cases take up to eight years to process.

Hipkins held out some hope saying: “This is something that we will be announcing further policy on as the campaign unfolds. We have got some further announcements around immigration still to make on the election campaign.”

But that was dashed later in the day in Ōhāriu when Hipkins poured cold water on the suggestion that policy was coming soon.

“All I was alluding to there was we haven’t announced our policy for the forthcoming election. Don’t read anything into that, it’s just that our policy hasn’t been announced,” Hipkins said.

Luxon meanwhile, campaigned in Tauranga, cycling on a static bike connected to a blender that allegedly makes “the perfect smoothie”.

He visited the rugby sevens at the AIMS Games and handed out gold medals to the Tauranga Intermediate School girls’ team and to the Te Puke Intermediate boys’ team.

Chris Hipkins joins supporters campaigning in Johnsonville. Photo / Thomas Coughlan

He announced a plan to make balanced literacy mandatory in schools in order to help boost literacy rates.

“The problem in New Zealand is our literacy rates have been steadily declining in recent years,” he said.

Back in Wellington, Hipkins visited Quay Marine, a business in the electorate that repairs the Interislander ferries.

If he had been hoping for an easy photo-op, he was not given one. Hipkins was escorted into an office, away from the media, for an intense discussion with the business’ owner Alan Collins.

A source in the room confirmed the discussion included New Zealand’s high income tax rates - a key tenet of National’s campaign.

Christopher Luxon rides a Zespri smoothie bike while attending the AIMS Games in Tauranga. Photo / Alex Cairns

Collins said after the meeting that high personal income tax rates meant people did not want to work overtime because it pushed them into higher tax brackets.

“If I get the boys to work overtime they go into the next tax bracket. It’s just not worth it to work,” he said.

Hipkins later said he would not be cutting income tax rates because the spending cuts they would require are too great. But he did not rule out hiking taxes higher by rolling out Labour’s social unemployment scheme, which National dubs a “jobs tax” and would levy a 1.39 cent charge on every dollar earned, about $834 for someone earning $60,000.

Hipkins promised Labour will have a clearer position on the tax later in the campaign.

National’s finance spokesperson Nicola Willis seized on this and said Hipkins needed to rule it out.

“It would make a worker on an income of $60,000, $834 worse off every year. That’s $834 less for groceries, bills, and people’s own savings. It’s a cost Kiwis simply can’t afford,” she said.

Thomas Coughlan is deputy political editor and covers politics from Parliament. He has worked for the Herald since 2021 and has worked in the press gallery since 2018.