THIS MORNING, a right-wing political poll showed that New Zealand’s Labour Party would win the next election if it were held today.
The Labour Party’s leader, Chris Hipkins, sensed a shift in the winds in advance of the poll and announced a tepid policy plan that looked like a Deloitte powerpoint. He declared he wouldn’t repeal the right-wing government’s ecocidal fast-track legislation or its white supremacist “gang patch ban” law, and then refused to tax the rich and lied that he’d build houses at meaningful scale for the poor. Nothing will change under Chris Hipkins if he wins. If he lies to the public to do it, he’ll usher in an even further right-wing government, like Joe Biden did in the U.S. and Keir Starmer is set to in England.
Who is Chris Hipkins? A little boy whose parents took him to the pie shop for his birthday? A piece of white bread made sentient by a witch? A lazy, racist middle manager who clawed his way to power through sycophancy and palm-greasing? An Antipodean avatar of liberalism itself, funnelling money to his consultant friends one last time before his ideology collapses? Regardless of what Hipkins is to you, he’s, above all else, lazy. He needed to be shamed into doing social media outreach by a critic’s viral tweet. Now, he wants to capitalise on the work of the left-wing to deliver him to power like an Uber to its destination. I refuse to let him do that.
In her Spinoff piece, writer Lyric Waiwiri-Smith argued that Hipkins “played his cards right” by not “interrupting his enemy while they made mistakes.” Waiwiri-Smith and the other political writers who parrot this line are wrong. A paper bag could poll better than our current right-wing government after their decimation of the job market, their starvation, and burning of children, and their increase of homelessness in Auckland by 53 percent. Hipkins barely squeaking ahead of them amidst the largest quality-of-life decrease for working people in decades is a testament to his failures rather than his successes. He should be burying his competition rather than polling neck-and-neck with them.
On a political level, Hipkins is a pathetic loser. On a personal level, I hate him. I’m part of a left-wing political organisation and spend my nights and weekends doing unpaid organising to build a better world. People regularly threaten to kill me and people I love, and I’ve had to give up art, music, and relationships to commit time to fighting a global slide into fascism. I’ve become like a T-1000 with my time, working around a full-time job to organise rallies, protests, and campaigns. I schedule my days into half-hour blocks from 8am to 8pm to accomplish my goals. I’m tired, I’m stressed, and I’m at personal risk from the work I do. I refuse to do that work, so the human incarnation of a milk carton can ride my efforts to power.
This coming election, ditch Labour. Tell your friends and family to vote for Te Pati Maori or the Greens. Join a communist – not a social democrat, but a communist – group and start organising. We can build power in the rural regions, West and South Auckland, the Hutt, and other places, but we need to start now. Liberalism won’t save us, and we have to save each other. To do that, we need to put Chris Hipkins in the rearview mirror.
This article was first published by 1/200.
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