Chris Hipkins

And it's a big part of my motivation every day is to get out of bed every morning and think, what are we doing to give these kids a chance to have a different life to the one that they've got now?

I grew up in Lower Hutt.

Yep.

And so we grew up, I grew up in a little suburb called Waterloo.

I actually went back there the other day.

It feels so different now to when we grew up.

So we grew up on a statehouse street.

And there were a mix of state houses that had been sold and state houses that were still state houses.

So we were one of the ones that had been sold.

Mum and Dad were in a position to be able to buy their house.

And they worked hard.

My dad worked in retail when we were kids.

He dropped out of school before school.

He broke his arm and so couldn't sit his exams.

So just went off and got a job.

and he worked in retail and my mum was a teacher so education was big for both of us probably for different reasons mum as a teacher dad wanted us to have education that he hadn't had and so education was a big thing for them and dad as we got older he became a maintenance contractor self-employed which actually is great for him because it meant that he was flexible i mean when they needed a dad to go on the school camp he was always there on the school camp and everything

So we were really lucky to have parents who were able to do all of that.

So I went to Waterloo School, then Intermediate, and then I went to a secondary school called Hutt Valley Memorial College, or Petone Tech, as it was more commonly known then.

So back in the day, it had been one of the technical colleges.

Yep.