OPINION
They chose Chippy. It was not a surprise: Chris Hipkins was the minister perceived to have the safest pair of hands. But being a good performer in the second tier isn’t the same thing as being the boss: just ask Todd Muller and Judith Collins and those four men who succeeded Helen Clark.
Hipkins, known in Parliamentary circles as Chippy, still has it all to prove.
And we want a lot more than safe hands. We need inspiration, renewed confidence, a sense that the great adventure of being New Zealand in the modern world is still worth undertaking.
The name “Chippy” is not just an abbreviation of Hipkins’ name but a nod to his appearance and apparent personality. It nails him as a competently cheerful sort. If this was Swallows and Amazons, he’d be John. The reliably buoyant oldest boy, born to leadership and good at sailing.
This may come as a disappointment to National leader Christopher Luxon, who may have fancied himself in the John role, with his deputy Nicola Willis as sister Susan, who does all the boring work.
(Jacinda Ardern and Grant Robertson, in this reading, are the Amazon pirates Nancy and Peggy, although the British school-days adventurist metaphor may be about to run aground so I’ll stop.)
Why is it okay to call Hipkins “Chippy” when it’s wrong to call Ardern “Cindy”?
Because Chippy is a term of friendliness, while Cindy is an insult. Hipkins’ friends, like Robertson, use the name publicly. Chippy himself seems okay with it.
Ardern, on the other hand, asked us years ago not to call her Cindy. It’s a name she has always disliked. Which means it is used only as an insult.
It’s also a way of telegraphing that you think it’s okay to insult her, not for anything she’s done, but just for daring to be. And that, in turn, carries other freight. Calling Ardern “Cindy” means you are fine with every sick joke anyone can think of.
One of my colleagues at NZME likes to say women should toughen up. Invariably, though, women who are supposed to “toughen up” have already done that. Ardern has been toughening up for a long time, and she’s made it clear she’s sick of it.
Besides, it’s really not about how tough you are. People with rhinoceros hides cannot be the only ones allowed to do politics.
The big political news last week, until Ardern’s even bigger news, was that 24 “rich listers” donated a staggering $2.3 million to the National Party last year. Act received another $1.2 million.
In contrast, Labour was given $150,000, the Greens $123,000 (all of it tithes from the party leaders) and NZ First $35,000.
These are the combined amounts from all donors who gave $30,000 or more to a party in the calendar year. The data was released by the Electoral Commission.
This is completely new. In the last pre-election year, 2019, National raised only $50,000 like this. In 2022, though, National received 15 times more money in large donations than Labour; in fact, it received more in that way than Labour did in every year since 2013 combined.
This fundraising triumph was the work of former party deputy leader Paula Bennett, performing a party role that seems to complement her day job as “national director of customer engagement and advisory” for Bayleys Real Estate. In that capacity, the company says, “She leads our engagement with select corporate, government, large developers and private wealth.”
Bayleys was one of National’s 24 biggest donors last year, contributing $160,000 to the party.
Bennett’s gladhanding skills, you might say, have made her a Wine and Cheese Ambassador Extraordinaire.
The lists of National and Act donors are sprinkled with names from the glory days of the 1980s: people who made their fortunes during a time when government assets like power and telecommunications were being sold. They include Trevor Farmer (who gave $100,000 to each party last year), Craig Heatley (National), Dame Jenny Gibbs (Act) and Murray Bolton ($250,000 to National).
Some of the business leaders who have risen in their wake are also prominent on the lists, including Rod Drury (Xero), Nick Mowbray (the Zuru toys founder who gave $250,000 to National) and New Zealand’s richest person, Graeme Hart. He gave $250,000 to National and $100,000 to Act.
What are these donors hoping to buy?
Economic analyst Max Rashbrooke has suggested they might be worried about “Labour’s plan to research how much tax the wealthy do or do not pay, the new top tax bracket [and] property investor taxes”.
Is that it? They just don’t want to pay more tax? They think Luxon is Liz Truss? Bloody hell.
Or is it the national debt? Even though, post the big Covid spending, New Zealand has a lower level of debt than all other democracies in the developed world. Per capita, Australia has about twice our level of debt; Singapore’s is six times as high. Finance Minister Robertson has been so cautious, debt is reducing ahead of schedule.
On the right, though, there’s an obsession with debt. John Key and Bill English, in power 2008-2017, made eliminating it their number-one goal.
Here’s one example of what that meant in practice. In the five years to 2017, National budgeted a total of only $781 million for “health infrastructure”: mainly, the maintenance and replacement of hospitals. In both 2015 and 2016, the figure was zero.
The result was that from Whangārei to Middlemore, the Hutt Valley to Dunedin, hospital buildings throughout the country were allowed to decay. Many, we have since discovered to our horror, are rotting, dangerous and urgently need replacing.
In Labour’s five years from 2018, they allocated $5.8 billion to addressing this. But to make good on the years of neglect, there is still much more to do.
Do the super-wealthy donors of the centre-right care about this? Perhaps they don’t see the need – literally – because when they need healthcare they do not go anywhere near a public hospital.
What about other economic indicators? In addition to relatively low debt, New Zealand currently enjoys good terms of trade on the back of the best farm prices in a decade, low unemployment and lower inflation than most countries in the OECD. And pundits expect the recession, if it happens, to be short and shallow.
But perhaps the donors have their eye on something else. Rashbrooke suggested “grumpiness at the Government’s Covid policy” might be a reason for their largesse.
Another little history check. National responded erratically at every step of the unfolding pandemic in 2020, before working its way around to conceding the right steps were taken.
And while it’s obvious enough that Labour should have done better with the vaccine rollout and MIQ, is there anything in National’s record to suggest it would have done any better?
MIQ was awful for many people, but it wasn’t an exercise in gratuitous cruelty, it was there to preserve public health. And we know exactly what happens when public health is a low priority, because we’ve already seen it in action. It’s called Boris Johnson.
Johnson was the libertarian-inclined centre-right leader during the worst of the Covid crisis who didn’t let anything, even the needless deaths of tens of thousands of his citizens, get in the way of the money markets. Is that what the donors want here?
Or are they climate denialists, keen to put the brakes on even the moderate response to the climate crisis we’re working through now?
Perhaps all they’re really worried about is “incompetence”. After all, several Labour ministers have stumbled, there’s no denying it.
But is it incompetence those donors are upset about, or the opposite?
Maybe what really keeps them awake at night are fair pay agreements, rising minimum wages, inflation-indexed benefits, even slightly stronger trade unions. The things the Government has quite competently done to create a more equitable society and a higher-wage economy. Is that it?
Perhaps, given the extraordinarily influential role their $3.5m will have this election, these donors would like to explain themselves.
Chippy vs the donors de Luxe, eh.
Luxon announced his revised front bench last week and competence is not the first word that springs to mind. Once the PM has done the same, we can start comparing.
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