Arch-pragmatist Chris Hipkins is dragging Labour back to the centre – and the left into election contention

ANALYSIS: Chris Hipkins wants to win. You can sense it come out of his every pore and it has seeped into the Government, giving it new purpose and hewing back to Labour basics: make life and opportunities easier for people.

The latest 1 News Kantar Public Poll shows that, so far, the message is working.

Labour might have dropped by two points since the first poll taken after Hipkins became PM, but the crucial thing about the new poll is that National and ACT cannot command a Parliamentary majority even with the (unlikely) support of Te Pāti Māori.

While the numbers around the smaller parties will bounce around, National will now be concerned about the trend. On the numbers in this poll Labour and the Greens together would take 60 seats in the House – exactly 50% of them.

Of concern for Luxon will be his personal popularity as preferred prime minister dropping to 17%, a level on this poll not seen since he first got the job, while Hipkins has continued to climb to 27%.

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Overall, National will be hoping these polls reflect being starved of political oxygen for two months.

But back to Hipkins, after years of disaster management and a previous prime minister who was high on rhetoric but short on delivery in some key areas – including health, climate and housing – Hipkins’ cheerful concentration on getting rid of stuff people don’t care about or find irritating is refreshing.

He is in the older Labour tradition of improvement in people’s lives rather than the more amorphous progressivism.

“I want to make sure that New Zealand is a country where people who go out there and strive and work hard, are able to get ahead in and feel like they’re making progress,” Hipkins said, explaining that he wanted to enshrine “the promise of social mobility” for New Zealanders.

This is an important shift from the Ardern administration which talked a lot about fairness but not much about opportunity or aspiration.

In climate change his bread and butter politics had stomped the Green party’s political equivalent of plant-based alternatives, rubbing out a nearly $600 million cash for clunkers scheme to get people into electric vehicles.

He’s also nixed a scheme for car-sharing with electric vehicles. He rightly pointed out – politely out of respect to the Greens – that these are expensive and not very effective policies.

“I want to make sure that we’re actually living up to our clean green credentials,” he said.

While the Greens will be disappointed, getting Labour up to a competitive position for October 14 is in its medium term strategic interest. A Labour-Greens Government is infinitely better for the Greens than being in opposition, even at the cost of losing a couple of dinky policies. Without Labour winning the centre, the left will not govern.

On the spending side, Labour has also gone completely pragmatic, reasonably responding to those on fixed government incomes, bumping up NZ Superannuation, benefits and student allowances by the level of inflation – 7.2%. Only a few years ago it was indexed to wages growth, which has now been outstripped by the increase in the general level of prices.

It will mean $100 more each fortnight for a couple claiming NZ Super. That’s a tank of petrol each fortnight for a small car.

There were notable other measures gone, or scaled back – voting rights for 16-year-olds (except, curiously, for local Government elections) pushing any new rules around liquor sponsorship and pricing to the long grass of 2024, signalling that light rail in Auckland will only be done in stages (not that we know what this will look like at this point anyway) and scrapping almost all the speed limit cuts around the country except the most dangerous roads.

National, predictably but with some cause, dismissed the changes by saying that basically the Government has wasted the past five years. This is a serious challenge to the Hipkins ascendancy and could be the major stumbling block towards convincing people to vote for him again – if properly executed.

Nevertheless, clearly Hipkins is going all in to win. And he wants to do so by concentrating on making life a bit easier for most people and not doing anything too flash.

Whether he has the policy prescription to do it will be what the election if fought over.