After Jacinda Ardern’s unexpected resignation last week, Chris Hipkins was sworn in in New Zealand this morning.
Who is Chris Hipkins?
Born on 5 September 1978, Hipkins is 44 years old, was elected to parliament for the first time in 2008 and was Minister for Police and Education in the last Ardern government. But New Zealanders know him in particular for having been Minister of Health since July 2020, consequently the one who had the honor of dealing with the management of the Covid-19 emergency in the country.
On that occasion, in addition to being noticed for his rigor, he also stood out for his self-irony: the gaffe in which he said that the New Zealanders should have maintained physical distancing while “opening their legs”, instead of saying while “they stretch their legs.” At a later press conference, he was seen holding a cup that read: “Spread your legs, don’t spread the virus.”
Self-irony that can also be read in the announcement of the discovery of having emerged as a Labor candidate, “while the doors of the plane on which I was traveling were closing”, and in the post published today to celebrate the oath. “In 2017, when I was first sworn in as a minister, when the Governor-General signed off on my mandate I made a joke that we were going ‘straight to the billiard room.’ I didn’t realize that all the mics were on. Today I was much more contained,” Hipkins wrote on social media.
Parental leave and death threats
He studied at the Victoria University of Wellington, where he obtained a degree in politics and criminology. In September 1997 he was one of dozens arrested protesting the Tertiary Review Green Bill in Parliament. The judge later ruled that he should not have been arrested given the peaceful nature of the protest.
We also know that he is in favor of same-sex marriage, has promoted several educational reforms and was one of the prime ministers to request extended paternity leave for the birth of his second child in 2018. However, he has received criticism for the case of Charlotte Bellis – the New Zealand journalist of Al Jazeera who had denounced the impossibility of returning home from Afghanistan to give birth to her daughter due to the stringent Covid regulations in force in the country – and received death threats for speaking out against a billboard advertising weapons at a discounted price
Inflation and declining consensus: these are the challenges it will have to face
As prime minister, the challenges he will have to face concern above all inflation and the cost of living, on which he has already announced his intention to intervene. As Labor leader, on the other hand, he will have to try to make up for the physiological decline in the party’s consensus (currently around 30 percent), after the exploits of the last general election in October 2020, when Labor’s victory amounted to almost 50 percent approval. And above all to cushion the blow that the resignation of Arden, a very popular leader in New Zealand, could have on voters.
Certainly he has already assumed a record, that of having chosen Carmel Sepuloni as his deputy. It is the first time, in fact, that a person with Pacific Islander ancestry has assumed this role.