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Chapter 1: What are the current challenges facing Kiwis today?
With everything going on in this world at the moment, with Iran, with Gaza, with fuel and the cost of living, I decided to get on someone that could potentially help us all.
They haven't affected regime change like they said they were going to. What they've done is just inflict pain on the rest of the world. And nobody knows how this is going to end.
So I sat down with Chris Hippekins and I asked him, I put all of those questions to him. What would you do different? What's your thoughts on it all? And surprisingly, he answered.
I think there's been a total lack of leadership there. We should have recognised Palestine as a state three years ago.
Chapter 2: How does Chris Hipkins view the impact of rising fuel prices?
Whenever I sit down with politicians, I don't want it to be an ad for that political party. So I always try and find out the person behind the politician.
It's easy to look at life from your own advantages and your own perspective. Putting yourself in the shoes of someone else is a lot harder. You should always think about if this was the other way around, how would I feel about that?
So I got to know Chris a little bit more, peeled back the curtain about who he is, where he went to school, why he decided to become a politician, and what his why is. And before you all start bashing me saying I'm a Labour supporter, Anyone out there watching from ACT, from National, from NZ First, you're welcome here. Come on. Unfiltered with Dave Luteli.
So don't forget to like, comment, share and subscribe. Chris Hipkins. Enjoy. Unfiltered is produced by the Team at Fanaticals and we are part of the Acast Network. Chris Hipkins, thank you so much for joining me, bro.
Yeah, good to be here.
How's it going?
Yeah, it's good. I mean, it's good for us. It's tough going out there, though, for a lot of Kiwis. Been out and about around the country over the school holidays. And be fair to say that there's a lot of Kiwis who are finding the goings pretty tough. The spike in the price of fuel has hit a lot of families really, really hard. A lot of small businesses really hard as well.
But it was pretty tough going for them before then. So we've been just talking to them about what they're doing to get through and how they're supporting people through that.
Yeah, but how are you going?
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Chapter 3: What insights does Chris Hipkins share about leadership and politics?
Yeah, no, I'm good. You can probably see I lost a little bit of weight since I last spoke to you.
Is it less like conferences and all this sort of stuff when you're not in power?
Well, I'll have to confess, you know, because I had a bit of an exercise regime in the first part of last year and I just wasn't losing any weight at all. And then I had to change my diet. I actually did less exercise, but better dieting. It's all nutrition. And it was totally nutrition. Way too much sugar. Way too much sort of just rubbish in, rubbish in. And so I focused on hydration.
So it's amazing. I didn't know... that part of my hunger wasn't actually hunger it was thirst and so when I started drinking a lot more water my appetite started to sort of dial back a bit which was a huge thing for me and especially it's a high pressure job you're in you know so high stress so you've got to look after yourself
Chapter 4: How did Chris Hipkins' upbringing influence his political views?
Yeah. And so, I mean, I focused, I still try and do a bit of exercise, eat better. I adopted a rule that one of my old colleagues said to me, my old boss, Trevor Mallard said to me, if you're going into politics, don't eat while standing up. If you don't eat when you're standing up, you'll be all right.
Because what happens is you go to places and you're always on the move and there's always food and stuff. And if you just restrict yourself to just three meals a day, then actually it's not so bad. So that's what I've been trying to do.
Yeah, with this, you know, speaking about the feeling that so many people are doing it tough, and I often talk about it with people. You know, you've got, for those people who only just had their heads above water pre-COVID, started to drown. Then you had the cyclone, the floods, the cost of living, now the fuel.
Why, you know, it just seems like this government's doing nothing, nothing really to help. You know, it's a little bit, which I'm sure people are grateful for. But, you know, when you look at what's happening in Australia, you know, with free public transport, they're taking the tax off. What more could we do?
There's a lot that the government could be considering. So if you think about the really, really hard stuff. So diesel, it's really hard because diesel is now more expensive than petrol and you're paying road user charges on top of that. A lot of small businesses rely on diesel. You know, if you're a trader, you've probably got a diesel truck or a diesel ute and that all of that.
And if you're in the food distribution business, diesel is huge. So I reckon looking closely at what they can do there around diesel in particular, I think is important. The Aussies have done more. In fact, not only have they taken road user charges off, they've actually recycled some of the GST back into lowering the price of diesel. They should be looking at that.
But at a family level, the support they've given, that $50 a week, that's only going to a small number of families. So $140,000 sounds like a lot of families. Actually, it's a pretty narrow criteria. There's a lot of families on low incomes who go to work every day who are not going to get that extra $50 a week. And they do need to do more to support people through that.
So I think those are all things that should be on the table. Free public transport. You know, I'm very sympathetic to those calls. We had half-price public transport for younger people, which we'd put in place before the election and the current government took it away. I think that was a mistake because young people are among the group of people who really struggle in times like these.
Why do you think they haven't done those things? Is it that they don't care? The National Party told, in my view, it's a whopping lie before the last election, which was that the reason that we had high inflation in New Zealand was because of the spending of the New Zealand government. And it was not true.
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Chapter 5: What are the root causes of the cost of living crisis in New Zealand?
You know, it just seems like, you know, when you've got Nicola Willis up there talking, you've got David Seymour talking, Luxon talking. and sometimes it seems like they don't have a plan. And then I think, well, they personally don't need a plan.
It's good that you're not struggling, but I think you should be connected to people that are in the community helping people that are struggling so that you have that direct line in, right, so that you understand what's happening on the ground, you understand the impact that these decisions are having on people.
I totally agree with that. Look, I, I still like to go and do my own shopping and I do it at Pack and Save in Upper Hutt. And I've noticed a difference in the last two or three years. There's always been families who have lived pretty close to the edge in terms of being able to balance their budgets.
Then I've watched them in the supermarket and they'll get to the checkout and they might put back a bottle of wine that they had for a Friday night treat, or they might put back some chocolate or some ice cream or whatever. Now they're putting back stuff that's pretty basic.
You know, they'll be putting back a packet of Weet-Bix in order to make things add up on the grocery tally or a block of cheese or a block of butter. And that's a real sign for me that things have changed even more in the last few years. So, yep, people were getting to the checkout and being really careful, you know, about making sure that it stacked up. But there's more people now.
It's not that they're not being careful. It's just that they, even just for the basics, they can't make that stack up. So I still try and get out and about to see as much of that firsthand as I can, because I realize as a politician, you can live in a little bit of a bubble. You can be removed from that.
You know, there's a lot of families who are ending up needing to go and get food parcels, even though they've got two parents who work full time. That's just wrong. You know, if you have got two parents working full time, you should be able to not just live, not just afford the basics, you should be able to live comfortably on that.
But the fact that even with two full time incomes, you're still reliant on having to go to a food bank, that's just wrong. It says that the economy is out of whack.
You know, a lot of the times people that don't have an understanding will think, well, it's just all these lazy buggers. Go and get a job. And that's the thing, right? It's that it's more and more people that are working and people that abuse any type of system. That's only a minority.
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Chapter 6: How does Chris Hipkins assess the government's response to international conflicts?
And she told me the story about when they first ran this program, it was in the US, and a teacher took her baby into a school. And the baby got handed around the kids and they were learning about babies and how vulnerable they were and how you looked after a baby and all that. And she said there was one kid. I tell you, when she told me the story, I was in tears.
She said there was one kid who was just hanging back and he didn't want to get involved. And then it finished and the woman was about to leave. And this one kid had stayed behind. He hadn't participated when the baby was being handed around the class. And he went up to her. And he said to her, and he said, can I hold your baby?
Chapter 7: What motivates Chris Hipkins to engage in politics?
Because he didn't want to do it in front of all of his mates. And he held this baby and he learned about the baby and he was giving it cuddles and everything. And then he handed the baby back to her and he said, do you think it's possible for someone who's never been loved to love a child? Wow.
And I've heard her tell this story subsequently as well, and she had everybody in tears with that story because the next picture that she puts up on her slideshow is a photo of this guy as an adult with his wife and his kids, and he's an amazing dad. Wow. And you can change.
Yeah.
You can turn this around. But if you've never experienced that yourself, it's a big journey, and you need to have a lot of loving people supporting you through it.
Man, that's a powerful story, bro.
Yeah. And I can recite it word for word because it had such a powerful impact on me at the time because I was one of those kids who was always given lots of love at home and I never had to want for that. But I know that there are kids out there who are not in that position.
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?
Yeah. Talk to us about growing up. Where'd you grow up?
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.
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Chapter 8: What solutions does Chris propose for supporting struggling families?
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. And I was in a minority in the school in that I was Pākehā kid.
The biggest population was Pacific. The second biggest population was Māori. And then us Pākehā kids were the third biggest population. And then after that, actually, we had quite a big Indian population there too. And mum and dad decided that we should go to a school, a secondary school, that meant that we weren't just surrounded by other kids that were just like us.
They wanted us to grow up surrounded by kids who came from different backgrounds, different life experiences. And I never will ever regret that.
I think that was a really, really powerful thing for them to do for us as kids, to give us that appreciation that life is full of diversity, it's full of challenges for different people, and you have to be able to put yourself in the shoes of other people. So I went to, a month or two back, it was last year sometime, the drug and alcohol court that operates here in Auckland.
And I remember sitting there thinking, listening to their stories, thinking, if I was in that environment, how would I have coped with that? Could I have found myself in the position that some of those people do? And the answer, if you're being really honest, the answer is yes. Because it's easy to look at life from your own advantages and your own perspective.
Putting yourself in the shoes of someone else is a lot harder.
Yeah. Just having that understanding.
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