Hipkins calls Labour training exercise ‘ridiculous’ after ‘duck-faced horse’ slur error was made

Tuesday, 26 May 2026

Labour leader Chris Hipkins has called a training exercise senior MPs participated in as “ridiculous”.

Hipkins made the comment after audio from the party event revealed finance spokesperson Barbara Edmonds referring to Finance Minister Nicola Willis as a “duck-faced horse”.

An apology had been made, Hipkins said, and he said this episode provided the lesson that every party engagement should be treated as a public event.

Hipkins said he was OK with Labour MP Kieran McAnulty saying this “Government is full of horses, and horses are full of shit”.

Labour leader Chris Hipkins has called a party training exercise “ridiculous”, after a senior MP was recorded at it calling Finance Minister Nicola Willis a “duck-faced horse”.

Finance spokesperson Barbara Edmonds made the comment, with audio then leaked to media. Hipkins says she has since apologised to Willis.

“I didn’t need to speak to her about it,” he said at Parliament on Monday. “I think she made a mistake.”

In the training exercise, conducted as part of a Q+A session in a Labour Party list ranking event, MPs and candidates were asked by a party member whether they’d rather fight a hundred duck-sized horses or a horse-sized duck.

Edmonds, recorded in the audio leaked to media, talked about her Chinese heritage and said “we love duck”. She then referred to Willis as a “duck-faced horse”.

“Every week I have to stand up in the House and ask a duck-faced horse - did I get that right? - questions every single week,” she said. “And we’ve started to do it quite successfully, just by being able to prod them.”

On Tuesday morning, Hipkins, speaking on RNZ’s Morning Report, said he thought the MPs “got a bit carried away”.

“My message to them has been pretty clear, which is you've got to assume that all of these things are public events, and you do need to really kind of make sure that you're focused on, you know, talking about the issues that really matter,” Hipkins said.

“I think that people have to work on the basis that when you're doing these events, that they're public events, and that, you know, anyone can take a video or a recording and it can become public.”

The comments came after the Labour leader told Stuff he didn’t “have a problem” with senior MP, and campaign chair, Keiran McAnulty, using his “colloquial language” in that same training session, where he said, “the Government is full of horses, and horses are full of shit”.

Hipkins explained, “some of them are more flippant answers, to a flippant question”.

Education spokesperson Ginny Andersen had said she’d rather fight one horse-sized duck. “Because Christopher Luxon is a sitting duck, and we are coming for you,” she said.

Health Spokesperson Ayesha Verrall fashioned her answer into a song - to the tune of Old Town Road by Lil Nas X, listen in the video clip below.

“I’m gonna take my duck to the old town pond, I’m gonna ride ‘til I can’t no more,” she sings.

Hipkins said there would have been hundreds of people at the event.

The leaked audio also contained discussions about how Labour framed itself in the election, and how to learn lessons from the past.

Edmonds was recorded as saying she believed knocking their opponents down was a winning strategy.

“I believe one of the ways that we can fight those hundred, or the big one, is you actually need to start to discredit them as a caucus and as a group start to knock them down one by one, those, particularly those senior ones,” she said.