On the night of October 23 last year Chris Hipkins, devastatingly early in the evening so far as he and Labour voters were concerned, had to give the hardest speech in politics — the one conceding the election.
Unsurprisingly, it was not an easy speech to write. Labour had lost 31 seats in a historic slump from power, in the face of rallying polls in the last week which had given the party a sliver of hope.
"We knew that we weren’t going to get the sort of numbers that we had been aiming for but we didn’t know the full extent of what we were going to get until probably 9.30, 10 o’clock," Mr Hipkins told the ODT.
"We wrote it on the night and I hadn’t prepared anything — I don’t believe in doing that beforehand."
Previous defeated party leaders, notably Helen Clark, used their concession speeches to also resign as leader. Mr Hipkins opted not to follow suit and remains Labour leader today.
"I wanted to gauge what the party wanted," he explains.
"I wanted to gauge what my colleagues wanted and I wanted to gauge how I felt after the dust had settled. When I took over from Jacinda [Ardern, former prime minister], I knew that I had effectively six months before the campaign started, which was not a long time to be leader and prime minister, so I always knew it was going to be tough to win.
"We had a lot going against us: the cost of living crisis, no government other than Modi [in India] who had governed during Covid-19 had been re-elected and he only just sneaked in."
And then it started raining.
Cyclone Gabrielle was just one of many storms to assail Mr Hipkins; things were not going well in the House as National and Act New Zealand revelled in a succession of Cabinet ministers finding themselves in trouble, and outside the House the boy from the Hutt Valley was battling to establish himself in the public’s eyes as prime ministerial material.
In retrospect, Mr Hipkins was probably on a hiding to nothing. At a meeting two days after the election his battered colleagues did not agitate for a leadership change, and as Mr Hipkins took the summer holidays to ponder his future he decided that he remained up for the fight.
"The more I thought about the more I thought that I still love my job and that there is a lot in politics that I still want to achieve."
Which is all very well, but Mr Hipkins has had to sit through a hard 12 months of watching the new government rip up flagship Labour policies and taunt him and his colleagues while they were at it. At every chance they get Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, Finance Minister Nicola Willis, and coalition party leaders Winston Peters and David Seymour remind the Opposition benches that the country voted for change, while staring pointedly in Mr Hipkins’ direction.
"I think New Zealanders want the Labour Party to recognise that we were not re-elected," Mr Hipkins said.
"The first year has been about demonstrating that, recognising that we lost — and we did, we lost — and that we know that we will have to offer something different. We are taking time to really listen to New Zealanders about what they really want that something different to look like.
"Next year you will start to see more policy work come out, but I don’t think that we should sprint at that; before you get into your policy sprint you need to know that you are pointing in the right direction. Otherwise you are sprinting away from the problem rather than towards it."
At which point Mr Hipkins goes into attack mode, arguing that the present government is taking the country backwards and that its main achievement so far, bringing inflation back within the 1%-2% range, is really something that the Reserve Bank rather than Ms Willis should take credit for — it is a reminder that the first nine years of Mr Hipkins’ career were spent in opposition, and it was during that time he learnt his political skills.
Labour under his leadership would remain a party of big ideas, Mr Hipkins said, but it would have to explain those ideas more cogently.
"We were doing a lot of big things all at the same time ... we still have some big things that we want to do but we will be a bit clearer about our sense of priorities about that and we won’t be trying to do everything all at once."
Mr Hipkins is pragmatic about what 2025 holds for Labour: the electorate’s attention will remain on what the government is doing.
"We do have to start thinking about the future, though, and what an alternative would look like. We won’t be releasing things like costed policy plans next year but we will be able to talk more about our priorities, about vision and policy direction."
