Hipkins instead resorted to having Labour MP Ginny Andersen ask him a question instead.
Poto Williams could only glare as her nemesis on the other side – Mitchell - sat there in silence after peppering her with questions day after day.
The only reactions Hipkins got out of Mitchell was a sarcastic clap when Hipkins conceded gang tensions had risen. Another came when Hipkins declared "I am interested in what works, not empty slogans." It was clearly a jab at Mitchell's "soft on crime" broken record and there was a splutter of noise from Mitchell's direction, but his mask muffled his words.
At the end of Andersen's less than rigorous interrogation, a disappointed Hipkins sat down and said "come on Mark!" in the tone of a rider geeing up a horse.
Hipkins' art in the Covid-19 portfolio was in playing the dead bat. He does not play offensively or defensively – he simply kills the ball.
He would take even the most political-barbed questions as legitimate attempts to get information and give it accordingly, thereby killing the politics. Mitchell had spent weeks trying to get Williams to admit gang tensions were rising and she had resisted. Hipkins had clearly anticipated the same, so he dead-batted ahead of time.
Asked earlier in the day what he hoped to achieve he said "clearly there's been an escalation in gang related violence and gang-related tension, that's not acceptable so we do need to get that back under control."
The only minister in a new portfolio who got a question from National was Justice Minister Kiri Allan. Allan began well enough when Paul Goldsmith asked what her priorities were - setting out electoral reform, and putting victims at the centre of the justice system.
Then Goldsmith asked whether she would be advocating against anything that infringed on the principle of one-person, one vote. It was obvious his question related to the Canterbury Regional Council (Ngāi Tahu Representation) Bill, which will give mana whenua two entrenched seats on Environment Canterbury.
It is a bill Goldsmith has frequently criticised. Allan either missed it or deliberately misunderstood and instead talked about electoral law reform.
Goldsmith followed up with a specific question about the bill. Allan began by saying that bill was put up by a local council and so was not in her area of responsibility. Alas, she did not stop there.
She went on and on about the bill and by the time she ended, she may as well have painted a big target on herself for future questions.
Time for Hipkins to take her off to the nets for a coaching clinic on the dead bat.
Otherwise it was left to Labour to use its healthy allocation of patsy questions as warm-ups for the other newly minted ministers.
In an apparent bid to get the first-time nerves out of the way, Labour had its own MPs ask patsy questions to Hipkins, to Ayesha Verrall on Covid-19, to Jan Tinetti in her expanded role as associate education minister, and even to the seasoned Megan Woods in the Building and Construction portfolio.
Woods made a start in that portfolio by announcing a workforce into the shortage of gib. The announcement of that earned her sarcastic applause from the Opposition.
Whether he was still groggy from his recent surgery, or dreaming of his new life beyond the walls of Parliament, Speaker Trevor Mallard was in a remarkably tolerant mood for long answers, ensuring Question Time ran 20 minutes overtime.
But when Woods tried to strut her stuff with her new-found technical knowledge of 101 uses for plasterboard, even Mallard had had enough and pulled her up.
