The Empty Chair

Chris Hipkins and the Bankruptcy of the New Zealand Left

It is my practice in this Substack to write about policies and ideas when I enter the political arena. I try to avoid in personam attacks. Up until now. The world is in a crisis that would probably be even more dangerous than the 1963 Cuban Missile incident (yes – I remember that) and like it or not, New Zealand, like the rest of the world is going to suffer from the fallout from this crisis.

This is a time for people to pull together – to forget about political differences and work towards a common solution for the good of the country. But as Chris Hipkins demonstrates, he is not up for that. And by so demonstrating he is not up for anything else.

There is a particular kind of political cowardice that masquerades as wisdom. It speaks in the language of restraint, dresses itself in the garb of responsibility, and calls itself prudence. But strip away the euphemisms and what you are left with is a simple, damning truth: nothing. No ideas. No vision. No plan.

Chris Hipkins delivered a masterclass in this art form this week, and in doing so, he did New Zealand a genuine service — not the service he intended, but a revealing one. He showed, with uncomfortable clarity, exactly why Labour is unfit to govern this country.

Standing before the press gallery in the shadow of a genuine global crisis — weeks into the war in Iran, with New Zealand households facing real and escalating economic pressure — the Leader of the Opposition opened his mouth and produced precisely zero policy ideas.

Not one.

Instead, he did what the modern Left does best: he criticised, he gestured vaguely at incompetence, and then, when pressed for substance, he retreated behind a wall of excuses so flimsy it would embarrass a first-year politics student.

“The Government needs to come up with a plan,” Hipkins told the Herald when asked what should be done to help struggling households.

That’s it. That’s the contribution. That is the sum total of alternative thinking from a man who wants to be Prime Minister of New Zealand.

The audacity would be breathtaking if it weren’t so predictable. Here is a man who led a government, who sat at the Cabinet table, who signed off on decisions affecting millions of New Zealanders — and his response to a national crisis is to shrug and say: not my problem, mate.

He refused, he said, to come up with “policy on the fly.” As though thinking about policy is somehow beneath the dignity of an opposition leader. As though the entire purpose of an opposition — of having an alternative government-in-waiting — is not precisely to have thought through what you would do differently, and to say so loudly and clearly when the moment demands it.

But here is where Hipkins truly outdid himself. He reached, with apparent sincerity, for the Covid pandemic as a defence. During Covid, he noted, the then-Labour Government didn’t wait to hear National’s ideas before acting.

Let that sink in for a moment.

The argument, boiled to its essence, is this: when we were in power, we didn’t need the opposition’s ideas — so now that we’re in opposition, you can’t expect ours.

This is not political philosophy. It is not strategy. It is the reasoning of a student who hasn’t done the reading and is hoping the teacher won’t notice. It is, in fact, a confession dressed up as a point — an admission that Labour governed by ignoring alternative voices, offered now as a justification for having nothing to say.

But let’s face it – Hipkins acts and behaves just as he is – a peevish schoolboy.

The deeper problem, however, is not Hipkins himself. He is merely the symptom. The disease is ideological exhaustion on the New Zealand Left.

For years, Labour has governed — or sought to govern — not on the strength of transformative ideas, but on the basis of managerial competence and tribal loyalty. When the ideas ran out, they reached for process. When process failed, they reached for identity. And when identity proved insufficient, they reached for the oldest trick in the opposition playbook: criticise everything, offer nothing, and hope the government makes enough mistakes that voters return you to power by default.

It is a strategy as cynical as it is contemptible.

New Zealand faces genuine challenges. A global energy shock triggered by conflict in Iran. Households squeezed by costs that don’t care about electoral cycles. A government that may well be struggling to respond with sufficient speed or creativity. These are real problems deserving real debate — the clash of genuine competing visions for how a small, trade-exposed nation navigates a dangerous world.

Instead, we get Hipkins at the microphone, arms metaphorically folded, declaring that coming up with answers is someone else’s job.

Opposition politics, at its best, is a rehearsal for government. It is where parties test their ideas, sharpen their arguments, and demonstrate to the electorate that they are ready for the responsibility of power. Winston Churchill in the wilderness years. Helen Clark rebuilding Labour through the 1990s. Bill English holding a fractured National Party together after 2002. These were oppositions that did the work.

What Hipkins offered this week was the opposite: an opposition that has decided the work is optional, that ideas are a liability, that the safest political ground is the empty ground of permanent critique.

He is, of course, correct that the Government is in the hot seat today. That is true. Voters rightly hold governments accountable for their performance in a crisis. But voters are also watching the alternative. They are forming judgements not just about whether the current government is adequate, but whether there is anything better waiting in the wings.

What they saw from Hipkins this week was a man standing in the wings, refusing to learn his lines, insisting that knowing the lines wasn’t really his job until opening night.

That is not leadership. It is not even competent opposition. It is the political equivalent of turning up to a job interview and declining to answer the questions on the grounds that you don’t actually work there yet.

Labour was once a party of ideas — sometimes bad ones, often contested ones, but ideas nonetheless. The welfare state. Nuclear-free New Zealand. The economic reforms of the 1980s, for good or ill, reflected a party willing to stake out bold positions and defend them. Even in the Clark years, there was a governing philosophy, a worldview, a theory of the state and its relationship to its citizens.

What is Labour’s theory today? What is its animating idea? What does it believe about New Zealand, about the economy, about New Zealand’s place in a world that is becoming more dangerous and more uncertain with each passing week?

If Hipkins knows the answers to those questions, he kept them very well hidden this week.

Instead, he told New Zealand that he refused to think out loud – if indeed he is capable of thought. That solutions were the Government’s problem. That the opposition’s job was to hold its nose and point at the mess, not to suggest how to clean it up.

It was, in its way, a perfectly honest moment — more honest, perhaps, than Hipkins intended. Because what he revealed was not prudence or discipline or strategic patience.

He revealed an empty chair where a plan should be.

And New Zealand deserves better than that.