Why Chris Hipkins Cannot, and Should Not, Ever be PM of New Zealand.

Its easy to explain why Chris Hipkins cannot, and should not, ever be PM of this country:

1. He rolled out the Covid vaccine late & slow, to the extent NZ was bottom of 38 OECD countries for a large part of 2021. That failure ended up imposing a $30 billion cost we're still paying for today in terms of inflation & debt. It led to the nearly 4 month Auckland lockdown in late 2021 which was imposed to buy time to push vaccination rates higher. Hipkins was a key player in that decision. Just as the 2023 election resulted in the rejection of Labour by Aucklanders, who will not forget their incarceration due to the incompetence of the government at that time, should Hipkins ever stand again he will similarly be rejected by Aucklanders, who make up almost 40% of voters in this country.

2. Hipkins' NZ Herald essay saying that National "lacks vision" for Auckland & he is a better friend for the city beggar belief. Aside from the lockdown, whether its light-rail to the Airport or a second harbor bridge crossing, he can have all the visions he wants but his promises to achieve them have been proven not to be worth the speech paper they're written on. He's even arguing National should break its election promise of tax cuts. He's broken his own promises & wants others to break theirs. He's a serial promise breaker.

3. Hipkins rejected his own Labour Party Minister's David Parker and Grant Robertson's advice on implementing both unemployment insurance and capital gains / wealth tax. His decision to not run on those policies in election 2023 was not based on any Labour Party principles - quite the contrary, it was based on maximizing his own personal shot at power. Trying to reverse himself on that tax decision and now pretend he supports those policies is embarrassing. If he does now, why not before?

So as it stands, keeping Hipkins as Labour Leader all but ensures a Nats-NZ First-ACT win in 2026, as they can confidently assume that the vast proportion of Aucklanders will never vote Labour as long as our Prison-Warder-and-Breaker-of-Promises-in-Chief Chris Hipkins is there.

Sources:

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/opinion-national-lacks-vision-for-auckland-our-most-productive-city-chris-hipkins/2AO6SSKWX5AELKSDWMKKNTUAPY/

While Auckland Burns, Wet & Windy Wellington Wastes 1/4 of a billion dollars on a cycleway that follows a fault line for 5km & will host up to 360 "running" trips by 2030.

On a busy day, Auckland Harbour Bridge hosts over 200,000 trips. No money has been found for decades to build a second harbour crossing. Auckland's population, currently running at between 1.7 to 1.8 million, will shortly hit 2 million, given that NZ's population is increasing by around 100,000 a year at present and up to half of those will probably settle in the city. Auckland is getting bigger. Wellington is not. The bureaucracy there will not tell us how many are "working" from home. Most Wellington bureaucrats don't want to go into work anymore and their bosses are letting them get away with it. Lucky they don't work for Elon Musk or JP Morgan in which case they' be fired. Now we hear that a cycle track costing $236 million (given cost overruns it will likely end up being a whole lot more) is being built that runs exactly along Wellington's Fault Line for 5km. Given the thousands of civil servants being laid off in Wellington, the "working" from home culture there, and how every serious urban economist says its best to encourage density & not incentivize long commutes, what is the point of a cycleway connecting Lower Hutt with Wellington? Is it so Minister Bishop can be one of 360 people walking on it as he comes & goes from his Hutt South electorate, or Chris Hipkins can be one of 290 people riding an e-scooter on it as he goes to buy Fish & Chips in the Hutt where he grew up (which are the numbers projected to use it by 2030)?

Even given the number of cyclists they're saying will use the track - around 2,000 "trips" per day by 2030, which would suggest only 1,000 people going into work & back again - that's still a tiny number. Especially given that for much of the year it's wet & windy in Wellington & wont be used a lot on those days. There are just over 100,000 people in Lower Hutt, whereas for Auckland's projects the numbers are 10 times bigger. The benefit of spending 1/4 billion dollars on one of Auckland's pressing infrastructure needs is orders of magnitude higher. In a cost-benefit ranking of projects around the nation, which the new coalition is committed to doing, this cycle-way is far down the list. The project isn't environmentally friendly - they're dumping 144,000 tons of rock into Wellington Harbor & spending $10 million to try protecting fish. Wellington is lacking the agglomeration benefits that come with getting large numbers of cool, smart young people together in tight urban spaces to feed off one another & come up with new ideas & businesses that change the world. Why encourage those who even are in Wellington to go live in the Hutt? To paraphrase Rolling Stone Magazine, our Capital City has become a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of NZ, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into money that the rest of the nation makes so it can build things to save itself. Move the capital to Manukau City, by Auckland International Airport, and be done with it. Should Auckland not work, NZ will go down with it. When will Wellington get that point? Obviously never, because it wants to divert resources to itself.

Sources:

https://www.1news.co.nz/2024/04/03/behind-the-scenes-look-at-312m-pathway-connecting-hutt-valley-wgtn/