Haunted by Jacinda Ardern’s legacy, New Zealand PM Chris Hipkins hopes for a miracle

Despite a short supporter sugar hit, Chris Hipkins looks more and more like a dead man walking as polls suggest New Zealanders are about to emphatically bury him and Jacinda Ardern’s era.

New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins campaigning at Wellington station on Tuesday. Picture: Cameron Stewart

With just days to go before the New Zealand election, Labour Prime Minister Chris Hipkins is in Wellington train station, shaking hands and searching for babies to hug.

“G’day,” he says to commuters, some who don’t recognise him and others who do a double-take then throng for selfies. “I don’t have a bus stop near my house,” one says. “I’ll look into that,” the Prime Minister replies with a grin.

“My whole family voted for you,” another tells him. “We have always voted Labour, always will.”

Despite this short supporter sugar hit, Mr Hipkins looks more and more like a dead man walking as polls suggest New Zealanders are about to emphatically bury the six-year Jacinda Ardern/Hipkins era.

Mr Hipkins, 45, is racing across the country in the lead-up to Saturday’s poll warning voters against his conservative rival, Christopher Luxon, but nothing he says seems to be resonating with a jaded country.

Polls show Mr Hipkins’ chances of forming government have not rebounded during the campaign, as he had hoped. In fact Labour’s vote hovers at barely 26 per cent, a historic low and a stunning contrast to the 50 per cent the party won in 2020 under Ms Ardern before the national mood turned sour.

Unless there is a dramatic change in the final days, Labour faces the biggest defeat in the country’s modern political era.

Polls suggest Nationals leader Mr Luxon is set to claim government if he can form a working coalition with the libertarian ACT party and possibly NZ First, headed by veteran populist Winston Peters. They indicate that even if Labour were able to partner with minor parties it wouldn’t form government, given Mr Peters, Labour’s kingmaker in 2017, has refused to join any Labour-led coalition.

The fact Mr Hipkins is campaigning at all in politically progressive Wellington shows how traditional Labour strongholds are falling across New Zealand.

For weeks Mr Hipkins, who took over after Ms Ardern resigned in January, has been looking for a circuit breaker.

But to his chagrin, voters seem to want to talk about the very things his government did so little to address: cost-of-living pressures, housing, interest rates and infrastructure.

Mr Hipkins is not personally unpopular but his party is, and he is struggling to sell his promises on the economy and provision of services because his government’s track record has been so bad.

When Ms Ardern resigned following a slump in her popularity, Labour was seen as having been active on social, gender and Maori issues but having failed to deliver on policies that affected the majority of Kiwis, like cost of living, jobs and infrastructure.

Labour under Ms Ardern promised 100,000 affordable new houses but delivered only a handful. Key infrastructure projects such as Auckland’s light rail were either never started or are lagging far behind schedule. Even her hardline approach to keeping Covid out of New Zealand, which helped her win in 2020, had become a negative by the time she left office amid a backlash against ongoing Covid restrictions.

Mr Hipkins tried to distance himself from Ms Ardern’s legacy by introducing a so-called “policy bonfire” this year in which he dumped a series of her pet policies and shifted his party to a more practical footing, claiming he would focus on “bread and butter” issues. His poll numbers jumped briefly but have since fallen when it became apparent he had no significant new policies to replace them with.

Just days out, Mr Hipkins pointed out Paul Keating came from behind to win Australia’s 1993 election, but no such miracle looks likely.