Do we like Chris Hipkins?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A decent record on the harm test and a mostly clean one on character, marked down for an Ombudsman rebuke, a contested Covid-advice story and thin detail on some policy.
Hipkins grew up in Waterloo, in the Hutt Valley, with a mum who was an education researcher and a dad who worked in retail and then as a maintenance contractor. At Victoria University he became student president, then worked as an adviser to Trevor Mallard, trained staff at Todd Energy and got into Parliament in 2008 at 29. Suburban Wellington kid turned Beehive lifer, basically.
He built his name as the fixer: education, police and the Covid response all landed on his desk, and when Jacinda Ardern quit in January 2023 he was the one who took over. Labour then lost that year's election to Christopher Luxon, who still throws it at him in debates.
The scandals are mostly disputes rather than findings. Former Police Commissioner Andrew Coster alleged he informally briefed Hipkins about Jevon McSkimming in mid-2022; Hipkins told RNZ “It is not a fact”, and Luxon said he believed Hipkins. Separately, B2B News reported that a March 2022 Cabinet paper in his name carried advice about a possible risk from second Covid vaccine doses for teenagers, though it notes he isn't recorded at the meeting. In March he also faced personal claims on social media, and he said “I reject the allegations entirely”. Nothing there has been tested by a court or authority.
The one formal rebuke is a 2023 Ombudsman ruling. The Chief Ombudsman upheld a Herald complaint about weeks of delay in releasing flood-response documents from the Prime Minister's office, and the office agreed to apologise and report back on fixes. It's a bureaucratic slap on the wrist, not a rort, but it's not a great look for a bloke who promised a clean run.
On the harm check, we found nothing nasty in his own words. When Winston Peters questioned a Green MP's right to ask a question in “a country called New Zealand”, Hipkins called it “pure racism” in the House, and Peters called that “utter nonsense”. In 2025 he said NZ First was pushing a culture war over a bill defining a woman, and that people should be free to live as they choose. He told RNZ he's fine with the label “democratic socialist”. The gaps: we didn't read a full 2026 Labour climate or trans-policy platform, so those are unscored detail.
Right now it's a tough slog. In the latest 1News-Verian poll he sits on a net approval of minus 15, his worst this term, and Labour dropped to 27% in the poll cited at the debate. His answer is to keep the champagne corked: “No one should be measuring up the Beehive for new curtains just yet.”