For Mr Hipkins, his southern sojourn was his first trip here as PM although, as he told University of Otago students, he had travelled here when he was a student activist . . . and was reasonably sure that he had had a good time from what he could remember.
As an attempt by a politician to be relatable to his audience it was not a bad effort, but it hardly had a receptive but instinctively mistrustful audience rolling in the aisles.
Mr Hipkins had the misfortune to land on campus just as staff were making the final, life-changing decision whether to accept voluntary redundancy or not.
For a government which likes to tout the country’s high employment rate as a signifier of its achievement, this is a terrible set of headlines and a difficult issue for Mr Hipkins — who, lest we forget, was until recently the Minister of Education — to bat away.
Student audiences are nothing if not direct . . . one early questioner, essentially, asked Mr Hipkins why the hell he should vote for him rather than the other lot. The query was greeted with more applause than any politician would like to hear in that context, but it neatly distilled the object of the exercise.
‘‘I’ll probably give you the most political answer I have given so far,’’ Mr Hipkins replied. ‘‘The biggest increase in tertiary funding we have seen in 20 years, versus a government that actually wants to do the opposite of that. If you think things are bad now, imagine that there wasn’t an increase in funding at all, and imagine how much worse that would be.’’
Earlier, Mr Hipkins went through the rite of passage all Labour leaders have to brave and visit the KiwiRail Hillside workshop . . . as Mr Robertson did last week and many a senior party figure before them.The cathedral of industry that is Hillside looks very different today though. It is now a major building site, most of the historic sheds cleared to make way for a modern new wagon assembly operation.
It has taken a while to get to this point - the funding was announced by Shane Jones as part of the New Zealand First-promoted Provincial Growth Fund that Jacinda Ardern signed off on as part of the deal for Labour to become the government in 2020.
It is hard for a slender bloke in a suit to look at home surrounded by burly blokes in overalls, but having grown up in a commuter suburb in Wellington rail is not a hard sell for Mr Hipkins.
Mr Hipkins’ next step was just down Hillside Rd, at an office suite which is home to a much newer industry, computer game design. One of the few major new initiatives in Budget 2023 was greater financial support for the gaming industry, and the good folk at Balancing Monkey Games, Atawhai Interactive and Mune Studios were more than happy to lend their full-throated support for the initiative.
The sea of smiling faces was quite a contrast to the shouting crowds at the university, but both encounters should have left Mr Hipkins pleased.
Preaching to the converted is an easy political skill, but spending an hour in front of a hostile crowd and coming away relatively unscathed is much more of a challenge.
It was one which Mr Hipkins succeeded in, barely.
Careful now
National Invercargill MP Penny Simmonds had occasion to be very careful when asking Question 10 in the House on Tuesday. Her poser on early childhood education was pitched to associate minister Jo Luxton . . . whose surname, of course, is very similar to that of the National party leader. Ms Simmonds was, to say the least, very deliberate in her pronunciation.
Careless now
A bad week for Justice Minister Kiri Allan, who had to fill in for the absent Tourism Minister Peeni Henare for the third reading of the Self-contained Motor Vehicles Legislation Act (a law change covered in Southern Say a fortnight ago).
Unfortunately for Ms Allan, the speech she was handed to read was exactly the same speech as the one Mr Henare delivered at the second reading stage . . . something which National’s tourism spokesman, Southland MP Joseph Mooney, took great delight in pointing out during his reply.
