Labour leader Chris Hipkins went home last night to Lower Hutt, where he grew up, and held a public meeting, a preview of what is to come as the campaign gets into full swing.
Around 120 Labour Party sympathisers turned out to see him in Naenae, a state housing and beneficiary- dense suburb in the Hutt.
His audience was about half the size of the crowd the Prime Minister drew in the same electorate in the more prosperous Avalon suburb three weeks ago.
So, as might have been expected, Hipkins stuck to the Labour script, but what is unsurprisingly a problem is having to answer National’s constant attack that a Labour Government would introduce “at least nine new taxes.”
A young questioner asked him when Labour would do what the Greens and Opportunity had done and put out a detailed tax policy.
“In the coalition room, are those more expensive tax policies going to be a complete deal breaker for you?” the questioner asked.
“And also, can you definitively say today that your small target capital gains tax will pay for the policies that you propose?”
Hipkins dealt with the capital gains tax first.
“The simple targeted capital gains tax that we’re proposing is going to pay for all of the health policies, well, most of the policies that we have announced, including the free doctors’ visits, free prescriptions, free maternity scans, free cervical screening, and so on,” he said.
But clearly Labour is still haunted by Sir John Key’s famous riposte to Phil Goff during the Press Leaders’ debate in 2011: “show us the money.”
Hipkins intends to do that.
“At the end of this month the Government will officially open the books, and then we’ll be able to set out a final breakdown of them so everyone can see exactly how we’re paying for everything that we’re doing, but we need the Government to open their books before that,” he said.
Hipkins has tried to be emphatic all year that Labour will not agree to any of the tax proposals being put forward by the Greens and Opportunity.
But National is ignoring him.
However, he had another go last night.
“I have also been clear that big changes to the tax system need to have a mandate from the public,” he said.
“National said they weren’t going to increase GST, and they increased GST. There are people in this room, I can tell by the hair colour, who will remember the debacle about the surcharge.
“You’ve got to have public support for the big changes like that that you make.
“So, I’m going to keep faith with the commitment that I’ve made that a simple targeted capital gains tax is the only major change that Labour will support to the tax system in the next term, because I don’t think you should make major changes that the public haven’t endorsed.”
But Hipkins will be up against when he does Labour’s fiscal calculations after the release of the Pre-Election Economic and Fiscal Update. (PREFU)
He is making some big promises.
For a start, he will stop the public service cuts that National keeps threatening.
“We can’t afford three more years of this government. There will be three more years of cuts; 9,000 jobs cut from the public service,” he said.
“And if you think that that’s just public service jobs you’ve got to worry about, speak to some of our local businesses.
“I was speaking to a local business in the central city just a couple of weeks ago who said that when the government announced they were cutting 9,000 more jobs, his daily turnover went down by $1,000 a day because people stopped spending money because they didn’t know whether they were still going to have a job.
“If we want our communities to thrive, if we want small businesses to thrive, we’ve got to give people certainty.
“More cuts are the opposite of the certainty that they need. We cannot grow our economy by cutting.”
And he wants to build more state houses. (a popular issue in Lower Hutt) He said the last Labour Government had built 20,000 state houses in six years.
“We were catching up for decades of not building enough state houses,” he said.
“Don’t get too excited, because the sad news is it was one of the first things this incoming government cancelled when they came into government.
“I want to get us back to building state houses. We have the land to build state houses, and I tell you, it broke my heart in my first few years as an MP. I watched state houses in this community, just over there actually, being demolished, and the land sat empty for years, because they wouldn’t build more houses on them.
“When we got into government, we started building those houses. I want us to get back to building more state houses.”
Housing and health are two of Labour’s big three campaign themes. The other is jobs, which is likely to be linked to overall economic policy, which both he and Finance spokesperson Barbara Edmonds have said will not appear until after the PREFU.
The Taxpayers Union Curia poll this week showed that health is one of the policy areas where Labour outscores National.
A question from a woman who was a Nurse Manager in the Operating Theatres at Hutt Hospital showed why there might be so much disillusionment with National on the issue.
She had seen him say the health system was in crisis on some days.
“I’d like to actually say we’re in crisis every day,” she said.
“In the last week we’ve had to cancel numerous patients because we don’t have enough beds and we don’t have enough capacity and we don’t have enough nurses.
“I think that’s great that you’re bringing in free doctor’s visits.
“But for me to get to my GP it takes six weeks, so what are you going to do about primary healthcare and fixing that so that we don’t get overrun in the hospital?
“And what are we going to do in the actual hospital to fix the fact that we don’t have enough beds, we don’t have enough operating theatres, and we don’t have enough nurses?”
Hipkins’ reply ticked all those boxes.
“The first thing we’re going to do for our hospitals is end the government’s hiring freeze,” he said.
“There are too many vacancies being held by the health system because people can’t get approval to employ new nurses and new doctors”
Interjection: “Or it’s delayed.”
Hipkins: “Yeah, or it’s delayed. We’ve got to stop that. We are going to guarantee that every graduate nurse who completes their training and successfully passes their state exams will have a good job in our health system.”
Labour has already unveiled a plan to meet the GP shortage with a family doctor loan scheme to get more people into primary practice and also involving pharmacists and nurse-prescribers more in the system.
But he had a warning about the growth of corporates in the primary care sector.
“I think the corporatisation of private practice is also something that I’m a little bit concerned about,” he said.
This was something of a soft launch of Hipkins’ election rallies. He was safe, on home ground.
But after physical threats to Labour MP Ayesha Verrall from anti-vax fanatics associated with the Outdoors and Freedom Party at a meeting in Wadestown on Tuesday night, the police were taking no chances.
There were four uniformed officers there and at least two plainclothes officers; a high number for a suburban political meeting.
But Hipkins is undaunted.
“I am looking forward to the election campaign, and I’m looking forward to being on the campaign trail,” he said.
“We’ve only got two weeks to go in Parliament, and I’m looking forward to that being finished so that we can get out there and around the country and do a lot more of these sorts of meetings.”
