Is Chris Hipkins trying to bring back the Ardern era, or take Labour somewhere else?

Wednesday, 15 October 2025

Mike Moore and David Lange. Moore took over a mandate Lange had won, but never won an election.

Henry Cooke is the The Post’s deputy political editor, and writes a column every Wednesday.

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OPINION: The last time a Labour prime minister tried to retake office after being sent packing by the voters, it didn’t go well.

Much like Chris Hipkins, Mike Moore had become PM in the dying days of a two-term Labour government in 1990. Much like Hipkins, Moore‘s push to regain office seemed remarkably possible, as a recession and unpopular National Party fiscal policies made many reconsider his party.

But it didn’t work. By 1993 the left was fractured and still furious at Labour for its last term in government, interest rates were coming down, and Moore was not quite able to finish the deal.

Keith and Norma Holyoake, with their daughters, celebrate the National Party election win in 1963.

Luckily for Labour, every historical parallel can be countered with another. In 1957 National’s Keith Holyoake took over as Prime Minister just months before an election. He lost that election to Labour’s Walter Nash - but hung onto the leadership and went on to win in 1960, 1963, 1966, and 1969. Not bad.

Labour is set to release the party’s first major policy any day now. After two years with little more to offer voters than active repulsion at the coalition, this is now a big chance to define exactly what a Chris Hipkins New Zealand might look like in 2026.

Usually not much would ride on a single policy announcement. But Hipkins only has so much runway before the next election. And despite the Government facing immense economic headwinds, he’s only just ahead in some polls, with a margin that could easily be eaten up by Te Pāti Māori drama or a strong campaign from National.

Andrew Little’s win proves Labour is strong in Wellington - but it can’t win from there.

It’s understood Labour’s finance spokeswoman, Barbara Edmonds, has been visiting Auckland every week talking to businesses, so it is likely the policy will attempt to win at least some of this traditionally hostile crowd over. Labour is very aware that it lost Auckland at the last election and has no hope of winning again without retaking it, a job made somewhat harder by its very Wellington-based leader.

Hipkins gave some alternatives he would have implement had he been in power.

Labour’s Wellington organisation is strong - just look at its massive win in the mayoral race and close to clean sweep of the council seats it stood in - but whether that success is replicable across the country is an open question.

The big question Hipkins and his team have to ask themselves is whether they lead a restorationist project or an entirely new one. In other words, are they running for a third term of the Jacinda Ardern Government, or the first term of an entirely new one?

Prime Minister Keith Holyoake in 1971, near the end of his fourth consecutive term in power.

Hipkins made attempts to distance himself from the full Ardern legacy in 2023, but he was far too senior in her Cabinet not to be seen as a continuity candidate.

Holyoake was also very senior in the 1949-1957 National Government, and made no secret of it when running in 1960. At the launch of the party’s 1960 election campaign he explicitly asked New Zealanders to “return” National to government, talking up its “proven record of vigour, enterprise and honest administration”, and treating the one-term-old Labour Government as an aberration, only made possible by Walter Nash tricking voters with impossible promises.

A full return would be unwise. After all, Ardern resigned as her poll numbers began to drop, and to some Kiwis activates a kind of primal revulsion.

But she remains the most popular political figure in the country. That doesn’t mean bringing her back to politics would send Labour to victory, but it does make cuddling up to some of that Government’s legacy a bit more enticing. And if you watch Labour MPs in the House or in media interviews they are generally very keen to defend that legacy, not just throw it out.

There was plenty about that government the public does not remember fondly - the working groups, the lack of action on big infrastructure projects, the inflation, the Auckland lockdowns, the scandals that marked the last year, etc - but many Kiwis wouldn’t mind feeling as rich and confident as they did in early 2022 again, just as voters in 1960 didn’t mind going back to 1957.

All that said, there is a reason Labour MPs rarely try to pass themselves off as a nostalgia act. Their professed ideology requires forward momentum, and even if they might miss some of the economic arrangements of a bygone era, it’s not on brand for them to push only into the past.

And the past does have potholes for Labour. The over-promising. The ministers found wanting. The clear assumption that they didn’t have to hurry things, because 2023 was in the bag. If Labour acts like that again, or spends the entire campaign just complaining about the Government, it will be like the aristocracy after the French Revolution, having learnt nothing but remembered everything.