00:00:00
I need to warn you. What was your relationship with um drugs and alcohol like? Do you ever dabble?
00:00:07
You know, people were saying pretty horrible things. Are people ever rude to your face? Well, I wasn't always a good
00:00:12
partner. Thanks for admitting that. What do you think of Donald Trump? Oh, I introduced the world to Tony, so
00:00:23
that triggered a whole lot of uh rumors. Uh Tony is a very special woman, just to
00:00:28
be clear. I was sitting in a cafe in Patony. A woman walked past and just slipped a
00:00:33
little note and then I picked it up. It's not nice. My physical health's not
00:00:38
great. The decision that we took is not one that we would change now. Did we keep the measures up for too long? Oh, I
00:00:46
think farmers hate you, don't they? Um, Chris Hipkins, welcome to my podcast.
00:01:02
Thank you. It's good to be here. Yeah. Yeah, mate. I'm really excited to um to
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to uh have you here. I need to warn you, this is more like about you as a person
00:01:11
rather than uh policy. So, if you're expecting any tough questions, you've
00:01:15
come to the wrong place. Oh, very good. No problems. No problems. Um, first of all, how are you today? I'm good. I'm
00:01:21
good. Yeah. Know I've had a bit busy couple of days in Oakuckland and Dened and before that it's parliamentary
00:01:26
recess week this week. So parliament not sitting means we get all over the country and get to do interesting things
00:01:31
and um I actually find that that's quite uplifting stuff. So down in Deneden I
00:01:36
was visiting some really innovative businesses. So one of them was animation research. Ian Taylor, you know, makes
00:01:41
his name gets his name out there a bit. But the just seeing the stuff that they're doing around animation and the
00:01:49
use of technology, the use of AI, it's hard not to feel kind of inspired when
00:01:53
you get to spend time around people who are doing that kind of stuff. And that's
00:01:56
what's great. It was one of the great things about the job that I get to do is
00:01:59
you get to go out and you just get to meet these fascinating people and gives you a bit of an energy lift when you do
00:02:04
that. So this week's been good. Yeah, it's it's cool that, isn't it? I had um
00:02:08
Sir Peter Beak on the podcast earlier this year from Rocket Lab and there's a
00:02:11
kid from Invagle that had this this outlandish dream and has made it come true. Yeah. And actually we were talking
00:02:16
about him the other day, you know, went off to NASA, found that NASA was too constraining, so I thought I I'll go
00:02:20
home to New Zealand, I'll do it myself. And now we have Rocket Lab. I mean, how
00:02:24
amazing is that, you know, um and I I've been to his uh been to Rocket Lab here
00:02:29
in in Oakland. and you know just being able to see what people are doing, the passion, the energy they have for it,
00:02:34
but also the potential for the country, you know, the future potential for the country because um you know, I'm I'm a
00:02:40
big fan of our farmers. I've spent quite a bit of time over the last year visiting farmers as well and they're
00:02:44
also really passionate about what they're doing, you know, really down to earth and I I really love being able to
00:02:49
do that as well. But there's going to be a limit to the amount that we can make
00:02:52
out of farming. There's always going to be a natural limit to that. you know,
00:02:55
you can only farm so many cows, only grow so many trees, only, you know, produce so much stuff. And so the the
00:03:01
tech economy, the innovative economy, um, is going to actually create a whole lot of jobs for us in the future. And
00:03:07
so, you know, we we going to have to do a lot more of that if we want to be richer as a country. And it doesn't mean
00:03:11
that we're farming is not still going to be critical to us. It is, but it means
00:03:14
that we've got to have other stuff as well. And so, you know, people like Peter, Becky, and Taylor, these are the
00:03:19
people who are at the forefront of making all that happen for New Zealand. And it's pretty exciting. Yeah. the the
00:03:24
farmers hate you, don't they? Well, that's actually one of the reasons why I
00:03:27
went to visit a whole lot of farms because um you know, I actually kind of feel a bit of an affinity with the
00:03:33
farmers in the sense that, you know, I I would be quite happy being out on a farm
00:03:36
all day every day. You know, I um I actually really respect what they do and I can see why they're passionate about
00:03:42
it and I can see why they love it. And uh this impression, oh, you know, Labour Party hates farmers. I thought, well,
00:03:48
let's just go and talk to each other and see whether that's where we land up. And
00:03:52
the reality is every farmers and you know I've been to visit farmers who are
00:03:56
definitely not labor people. Um and by the end of it we're getting on really
00:04:01
well because you know we actually do have some shared commitments. I think that I think sometimes the farming lobby
00:04:09
um gives the wrong impression about New Zealand farmers. You know they give the impression some would give the
00:04:13
impression that New Zealand farmers just don't care about the environment, don't
00:04:16
want to protect the waterways, aren't interested in animal welfare. And yet every single farm that I've visited,
00:04:21
I've had entirely the opposite impression of them. They're going out of their way to protect the environment, to
00:04:26
think about the quality of the waterways, to to care for the welfare of their animals and so on. But I don't
00:04:32
think that's the impression a lot of Kiwis get of our farmers. And it's a
00:04:36
real shame because I think some of the sustainability practices in New Zealand farms are actually cutting edge. And um
00:04:44
you know I I think maybe one of our failings as a government is we didn't publicly give farmers enough credit for
00:04:49
that. You know what we were saying to them is we want to make sure everyone's
00:04:52
doing this. You know we want the whole farming sector to be at the cutting edge of sustainability and animal welfare and
00:04:58
all of that. Um and you know actually most of the farmers I've spoken to want
00:05:02
want us to be that as well. So I think there was a bit of talking past each other that was happening there and which
00:05:08
I which you know I'm I'm aiming to fix. Are people ever rude to your face? Like
00:05:13
you go into an a hostile environment like that like a a farm with an angry farmer like or or even at an airport
00:05:19
terminal or wherever it happens to be. There's there's a lot of um like I
00:05:23
mentioned you were coming in on Instagram and there were lots of questions but there's also just a lot of
00:05:26
like mean comments things that I'd never bring up. Yeah. So so ex that does exist
00:05:31
at several levels. I mean, the the worst of it, the stuff that people people will
00:05:35
write on social media. They'll never say that to your face. Others do, though,
00:05:40
and uh it's still a very small minority. There's a human psychology to being a
00:05:44
politician that takes you a while to get your head around. You know, when I started as a politician, if you go out
00:05:48
and about somewhere and you meet 10 people, nine of them are nice to you and one's horrible to you, it's the one
00:05:53
who's horrible to you that you're still thinking about at the end of the day,
00:05:56
not the nine who were nice to you. And so you have to kind of adjust your own sort of the way you think about things
00:06:03
to reflect that. So you've got to not just focus on the one, but focus on the
00:06:07
nine who are actually being really nice. And I think if you can do that, you you
00:06:10
can preserve your own mental health. I think the people who because it's a natural human reaction. If someone's
00:06:15
horrible to you, you spend time dwelling on it. And I think if if you're in politics and you allow yourself to be
00:06:21
consumed by that, politics is going to be pretty miserable place for you. You know, once you realize that there's a
00:06:26
chunk of people who are never going to agree with you, they're never going to
00:06:29
like you and it's nothing to do with who you are as a person. It's a political
00:06:33
judgment that they're making. Once you've kind of come to terms with that
00:06:36
and you make yourself comfortable with it, politics is politics is easier. You know, I I realized out, you know, door
00:06:42
knockocking was really interesting. It's one of the first things you have to do
00:06:44
when you're a candidate. You got to go out and knock randomly knock on people's
00:06:47
doors and introduce yourself to people you've never met before. And I realized
00:06:51
that there are people who open the door and they're like, "You're fantastic."
00:06:54
And I'm like, "We haven't said anything yet. You've never met me." And it's just
00:06:57
because they've seen a Labour Party rosette on me and and they're a Labour
00:06:59
people and so therefore they think I'm fantastic even before they've even met
00:07:02
me. But the reverse also is true. You I'll knock on people's door and they'll
00:07:06
be like, "I think you're, you know," and they'll say some pretty democ.
00:07:11
Yeah. Well, I mean 2008 was my first election campaign and that was the one where Helen Clark had been prime
00:07:15
minister for nine years and there was a degree of fatigue fatigue and also misogyny there. There was uh you know
00:07:23
people were saying pretty horrible things about Helen Clark by that point and you'd get that you know on the
00:07:28
doorstep and you realize that actually it's not me. I haven't said anything
00:07:31
yet. This is not a personal reflection on who I am. This is just politics. This is just how people feel about Labor or
00:07:37
feel about how things are happening. And yeah, once you can kind of compartmentalize that, it's not so bad.
00:07:44
But it does, that's having said that, it's not nice either. But there are
00:07:47
little things that happen which kind of really give you a boost. I was sitting in a cafe in Paton a couple of weeks
00:07:52
ago. Um, and a woman walked past and just slipped a little note which I didn't even really kind of notice at the
00:07:58
time. Um, and then I picked it up and as as we were leaving and it it was said something really nice about what a great
00:08:03
job she thought I was doing and keep it up and all that kind of stuff. And that sort of stuff happens and it just gives
00:08:08
you a real boost, you know? You sort of think, "Oh, that's that there are people
00:08:11
out there who who like what we're doing and that's great." I just can't imagine
00:08:15
someone being rude to your face. Yeah, it it I know it does happen. I mean, I I'm not naturally like that, you know.
00:08:22
If I disagree with someone, I'll generally try and find a nice way to say it. Um but uh but there are people who
00:08:28
are who are not that way inclined, you know, and and I think social media's emboldened a bit of that, too. you know,
00:08:33
this online world where people exist in these echo chambers where they think everyone agrees with me when maybe 2% of
00:08:40
the population might agree with them, but then they go out in public and that that emboldens them to be horrible to
00:08:45
people who they think are the minority, who they think are wrong. And you know, perhaps the best example um it was
00:08:53
vaccination. you know, you you get that really prompted some really nasty, horrible online, you know, stuff um
00:09:02
culminating in that protest that we saw out the front steps of parliament. And the thing that really made me sad about
00:09:07
that was I knew some of the people out there, you know, I recognized some of their faces and not all of them were on
00:09:13
at that end of the spe, you know, of the extreme. Some of them were moderate nice
00:09:18
people who uh kind of got caught up in something or in some cases there were actually people out there with I thought
00:09:26
altruistic motivations. So they weren't necessarily antivaccine. They just didn't believe the government should do
00:09:31
things that kind of um uh had an element of um uh mandate about them and so they
00:09:39
were there on principle. Now I actually respected that even though I disagreed with them. I did respect that. But then
00:09:44
they got sort of swept up in something that ended up becoming a violent protest where they were throwing bricks at the
00:09:50
police and I don't think that's who those people many of those people were.
00:09:54
But it just sort of shows how these movements can can sort of morph and take on a life of their own. Yeah, that was a
00:10:00
crazy time, eh? But it felt like it got to the uh got to got to a stage where anyone that had a
00:10:06
differing differing view about the vaccine or whatever was was sort of lumped into um you know, conspiracy
00:10:12
theorists or tinfoil hatwearers. I've had some people on the podcast like Gilded Kirkpatrick, um Barbara Kendall,
00:10:20
um I haven't had Russell Curts on, but I'd like to have him on. They were
00:10:22
involved with it and they're like sort of sensible people. Yeah. Yeah. I mean,
00:10:25
and that's the the funny thing. it it did become a very polarizing issue. And
00:10:30
you know, I look at what's happened in the States over the last 20 or 30 years.
00:10:33
I I like going and visiting the US. It's been well, it's been about just over 20
00:10:37
years since I had my first visit there. And I've watched the mood shift there.
00:10:42
So, uh, over that 20 year period, the polarization of US politics has just become so entrenched now where if
00:10:50
you're, you know, if you're a Democrat and your neighbors are Republicans, you
00:10:52
won't talk to your neighbors. um if you've got people in your family who
00:10:56
have a different view to your own, you just don't talk to them anymore. And up
00:11:00
until that kind of vaccine period, New Zealand sort of escaped that. We still all got on with each other even if we
00:11:06
disagreed. You'd still have a disagreement with someone down in the pub about politics. Um and and that was
00:11:12
okay. Whereas I that was the first sort of hint that I had that New Zealand is also prone to that polarization because
00:11:20
the stuff around vaccine it did for you know take it at an individual level take
00:11:24
the politics out of it for a moment within families it became a thing you know if someone was uh opposed to
00:11:30
vaccination in a family they it became a real friction point within the family where people would stop talking to each
00:11:36
other and you know I get asked about this a lot because of what's happening around the world at the moment And you
00:11:43
know, people say, "How can we avoid that polarization in New Zealand?" And it the
00:11:47
answer at an individual level is actually quite simple. Keep talking to those people in your family who you
00:11:53
disagree with. If you've got that auntie or uncle who says things that you think
00:11:56
are racist or homophobic or whatever and you don't like it, keep talking to them
00:12:01
because when you stop talking to them, that's when polarization starts to happen. And I think if everybody
00:12:07
continues to adopt that mindset, then we can avoid the worst of that kind of polarization that's entrenched in
00:12:13
countries like the US. Um it's, you know, they're good people. You know,
00:12:18
having a different view doesn't mean that someone's not a good person. And uh
00:12:22
I get um I sometimes get a bit frustrated by it, but then I see examples of where people are doing that
00:12:28
really well, just talking, continuing to talk. And that that that kind of gives me hope. Yeah. M
00:12:35
now I wanted to um largely um avoid politics today mainly because I'm I'm
00:12:39
not smart enough. I don't know I don't know enough and I'm prepared to admit
00:12:43
that. Um but also I mean you're former prime minister but you're also hoping to
00:12:46
be future prime minister. So I suspect there's a lot of things that I mean if
00:12:50
if we had this conversation in 10 years time it' be a different one now. Um like
00:12:53
if I ask you what you think of Donald Trump like you you probably can't give
00:12:56
me your real unfiltered honest answer. Yeah. No that's true. True. I mean there's still diplomacy still has a
00:13:01
role, you know, like and um who if if you are prime minister, you have to work with whoever the rest of the world
00:13:07
elects as their leader and that's true. You know, I think people who know my
00:13:12
values will know that they're very very different to Donald Trump's. I think I
00:13:15
can say that without breaching any sort of diplomatic protocols. Uh but if I became prime minister again, he's he's
00:13:20
still the US president. I still have to to work with him. Um I do find some of his past actions um very very difficult
00:13:28
to excuse. Um and I don't and I never will actually to be frank. Um because I
00:13:33
think one of the things about diplomacy is you don't have to give up your own
00:13:36
values in order to be diplomatic. Um it's about how you express them that that you might change and and I think
00:13:44
that is something that's a bit misunderstood. I think this idea that when you know because we're a small
00:13:48
country when we go around the world we just have to you being diplomatic um maintaining kind of relationships with
00:13:54
other countries means that we have to somehow give up what's important to New
00:13:57
Zealanders it doesn't you can still express those things but you just do them use different language it's not
00:14:03
inflammatory language it's respectful language and so I mean I I went to China
00:14:08
I sat in a in the the great hall with Xihinping and I made very clear New Zealand's views on issues around human
00:14:15
rights for example example and uh I did that really respectfully and I think that's that's a big part of what
00:14:22
diplomacy should be about and actually something you know maybe we should be a bit more diplomatic in the way we
00:14:26
interact with each other on a daily basis because you can disagree agreeably you can you can express a view to people
00:14:33
which isn't their view which they're going to disagree with but you can still
00:14:37
respect each other and uh you know maybe we we probably need to mimic that a bit
00:14:43
more in just our day-to-day politics but diplom means he has a lot to offer in that regard. The the Trump Zalinsky
00:14:49
thing that we saw a couple of weeks ago like you've had some, you know, some
00:14:53
meetings with um big leaders. Does that happen behind closed doors and we just saw that for in front of camera
00:14:59
for the first time? Is it showmanship? What is it? I I look frankly I think that was a made for TV moment. Um that's
00:15:05
not the way diplomacy works. Um I thought President Zalinsky was treated shockingly um in that meeting. Um, and
00:15:13
uh, I don't think that that in any way reflects the sacrifice that the people
00:15:19
of Ukraine have made over the last couple of years. Um, they've fought valiantly for values that um, are very
00:15:26
important to New Zealand and used to be important to the United States as well and I hope that the US won't depart from
00:15:32
them for too long. But that idea of um of sovereignty of you know around your own country is a pretty important pillar
00:15:40
of what has up until now been uh consensus around international diplomacy law um and action and we don't seem to
00:15:50
be in that zone at the moment. The zone we seem to be heading into is that uh might is right and I strongly disagree
00:15:58
with that. Um it means small countries like New Zealand um have to really rethink our international our approach
00:16:04
to international relations and who what we expect of our friends because um I don't think that might is always right
00:16:11
and we seem to be heading in this view that if you're a massive country with a
00:16:14
massive military you can do whatever you like and smaller countries just have to
00:16:17
suck it up and live with it. Um and I think that would be a disaster for the world.
00:16:24
Well thanks for that. So who are you outside of the job? But what music are you into? Yeah. Movies, TV shows. You
00:16:31
wouldn't have a lot of time for a lot of screen time, would you? I don't get a
00:16:34
lot of screen time. I mean, occasionally, you know, a little bit of Netflix at the end of the day just to to
00:16:39
wind down maybe, but um and then when I do that, I tend to watch box series and just sort of binge watch um or a movie
00:16:46
or whatever. Um I do really enjoy um DIY at home. Um I like to be able to do things that I can see a result from at
00:16:56
the end of it. So, um, going and growing stuff in the garden is great because you
00:17:00
can plant something and then you can sort of look after it and, you know, you can watch it grow and if it's producing
00:17:06
food, which is which I enjoy doing, um, there's a real satisfaction of being
00:17:10
able to grow something and then eat it. Um, or then, you know, grow something and then cook with it. It's it's really
00:17:16
cool. Um, so I like to do that. I like to make things. Um, I've I've I've got a
00:17:22
probably a huge amount invested in my garage, which is ridiculous for someone who spends very little time in it. Um,
00:17:28
but it does mean, you know, I can make cabinets and bookcases and stuff like that. So, put new bookcases in the kids'
00:17:33
bedrooms um recently and built a new cabinet to go under the TV to, you know, store all of their crap out of sight.
00:17:40
Um, and you know, all of that kind of stuff. And I really enjoy doing that. you know, I find it really relaxing and
00:17:46
the s satisfaction you get at the end of the day for and for looking at it and going I made that is is you know, I get
00:17:52
a lot out of that and I like to do things that I've never done before. So I the cabinet that I made um last year had
00:17:59
um uh those sort of soft closed hinges and um casters on, you know, drawers with casters. I'd never done that before
00:18:06
and didn't get it completely right. the drawers are a little bit sticky but um
00:18:10
but you know you learn from doing it and it's it's good fun so I like to do that
00:18:14
um love to go for a long bike ride. I find if I'm doing stuff that's workrelated you know if I'm u
00:18:20
particularly on uh when I'm working at home because you know one of the things
00:18:24
that I think that's changed about the world in the last four or five years is
00:18:28
that we're all much more used to doing things at home. And as a politician you
00:18:32
I do work at home from time to time. I mean, if I've got a big speech coming
00:18:35
up, I'll stay at home because I don't get distracted and I can sit there and I
00:18:38
can write my speech. But sometimes your head will get a bit muddled with all of that and you're kind of like, I've read
00:18:43
the speech 10 times now and I've completely lost sight of, you know, what I'm trying to say and go for a bike ride
00:18:48
for an hour. Then when you get back, suddenly you find that your sense of clarity has returned and you can really
00:18:54
do a much better job of it. So, um, yeah, I love to be able to get out on my bike. from Upper Hut's great, you know,
00:19:00
it's a it's a city, but literally if you bike up and over the hill, you're in
00:19:04
farmland within it's a sort of a 20-minute bike ride to get over the hill and you then you're in farmland and you
00:19:09
can just go and bike and it's it's big and it's open and it's it's fresh and I
00:19:14
love to be able to do that. Um, I love the beach. Um, beach is, um, you know, my family's been going there ever since
00:19:23
I was about, I suppose, would have been about nine. And, um, and it's a, it's a
00:19:29
pretty special place for us. So, my kids love it, too. And, uh, you know, again,
00:19:34
it's a like a big long walk on the beach has the same effect as a big bike ride.
00:19:37
You know, it clears your head out and puts everything back in perspective. Um, you know, you can your your troubles
00:19:44
seem quite small when you're on the beach because everything is so big and um, yeah, so that's bit about me outside
00:19:52
of work. Yeah. Um, what about music? You must be a bogan. Yeah, a little bit. You've got to be a
00:19:58
shead guy. Yeah. Yeah. Although, yes. Yes. But then I I also kind of going back to the 80s which is where my
00:20:04
musical tastes were kind of formed as sort of Bonjou V Midnight Oil uh you know those kind of bands from that era
00:20:11
and actually some real kind of Kiwi Anna music. I still um love Crowded House Split Ends Dave Dobin um and DD Smash
00:20:19
you know from back in the day stuff that emerged around the time that I was sort
00:20:23
of at university. Um, Golden Horse is still a a favorite on my um on my phone which I like to listen to on a plane.
00:20:31
You know, that kind of it's it's a pretty eclectic bunch of music really.
00:20:35
Yeah. Yeah. What were you like at university? You were you did a um was it a BA in criminology? Yeah, I did. So,
00:20:42
when I started university, I was kind of almost a reluctant university student. I
00:20:46
left school. I didn't really like school that much and I left school not really
00:20:50
sure what I wanted to do. Um my my parents were really wanted me to go to university so I enrolled in university.
00:20:57
Um I then spent the summer holidays I got a job over the summer holidays working for quality bakers stacking
00:21:03
bread in the supermarket and I actually really enjoyed that. Um it was hard work, you know, like it was physical
00:21:09
work, but I I you know, I was 19 or whatever, 18, 19. Um so I was fit and so I was, you know, it wasn't I really
00:21:17
quite enjoyed it. And um you could sort of walk away from at the end of the day and and that was that. And I did quite
00:21:24
enjoy that. Um and I enjoyed having the money that went with that. And so when time came to sort of reduce from working
00:21:30
more or less full-time as I was down to part-time, I kind of was a bit reluctant
00:21:34
to do that. But I did it. And the first year at university, I was kind of, I don't know, wandering around sort of
00:21:39
trying to find my place. And then by the end of my first year at university, I had I'd kind of made some new friends.
00:21:45
Not I was one of only three kids from my school that went to university. So, um,
00:21:50
you know, it wasn't like I had a friend group there. So, I sort of I made some
00:21:52
new friends. And I kind of had settled in by the end of my first year. And I got into student politics in my second
00:21:59
year. And I kind of went from being a quiet introverted kid who just sort of you know kept to himself to being much
00:22:05
more active and involved and you know that I guess kind of began the formation of who I ended up becoming as a
00:22:13
politician. Um I still have my introverted moments as the media famously like to report on from time to
00:22:19
time. But do they I miss that? Yeah. During the election campaign people complained that I was too introverted.
00:22:23
But meaning meaning what? Well I'm an introverted extrovert. you know, I get
00:22:26
out there, I love meeting people, but I also have moments where I like to stop and think, you know, if you've met some
00:22:31
really interesting people, it's nice sometimes to just sit and think about that, you know, and be like, "Oh, okay.
00:22:36
What, you know, whereas I think if you're extroverted all of the time, it generally means you're not listening."
00:22:41
Um, and I like to listen. And I that's that's one of the the that's part of the
00:22:47
magic, I think, of being in politics is you get to listen to other people. And sometimes they'll say things that make
00:22:53
you actually rethink what you what you actually believe. And I think when you when you lose the capacity to do that in
00:22:59
politics, I I think you're actually doing a great disservice to yourself and
00:23:04
to everybody else. Um my views on different issues will have evolved hugely in the uh what have I 16 years
00:23:11
I've been an MP. my views on things will have changed enormously in that time
00:23:14
because um the world changes and you learn more and the challenges in front of us change and you have to be willing
00:23:22
to change and if you're not willing to change I think you basically just become
00:23:25
a relic of the past. But I think there's still a lot of politicians whose views
00:23:28
on the economy, whose views on, you know, how we should live our lives is sort of locked in the 80s and '9s. The
00:23:34
world's moved on. You know, technologies moved on. The way we live has moved on.
00:23:39
You think about what AI is going to do to all to us all. You know, it's um and
00:23:43
I and I say that with a degree of both foroding and optimism. AI is going to be amazing on some levels. You thought
00:23:50
things you can do now that you couldn't do even two years ago because AI allows
00:23:54
it. It's just so exciting. But it's also going to fundamentally change the way we
00:23:58
live, the way we work. Um, and we've got to just be open-minded about that. Um,
00:24:04
if we if we keep sort of trying to hark back to what we were doing in the 80s and say, well, this was the, you know,
00:24:08
the magic blueprint for how it was everyone was going to be richer and better off, we we're just we're locked
00:24:14
in the past. I think that the world's moving on. So, um, yeah. So, coming back
00:24:19
to that thing about being introverted, extrovert, I love meeting people. I love talking to them, but I also like to have
00:24:24
quiet moments where I get to sort of stop and think about it. Yeah. So, you and I are similar age. I think I'm a
00:24:30
couple of years old. Actually, you know, you're getting older when you get pulled
00:24:32
over by the police and they're always they look like a kid. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. You go to the doctor and
00:24:37
you're like, "Yeah, they stop asking you for ID at the supermarket." Yeah. Now,
00:24:42
when I buy a bottle of wine, they don't even look at me in the peripheral vision. That's right. Yeah. You're good.
00:24:46
So, we're similar age. I'm from Palmer North, which is a university town. Just
00:24:51
trying to think back in the early 90s. Um I never went to pharmacy. I went straight to radio. But um yeah, I was
00:24:55
definitely like a binge drinker. I think um ecstasies, disco biscuits were a drug
00:25:00
of choice at the time. What was your relationship with um drugs and alcohol like? Do you ever dabble? I smoked a
00:25:05
little bit of weed at university. Didn't do anything uh harder than that. Certainly was a binge drinker. I think
00:25:12
most university students will go through that. funnily enough sort of reached a period when I probably by the time I got
00:25:17
into my 30s where or late 20s early 30s where I just found I I didn't enjoy that
00:25:23
as much anymore. I found that waking up in the morning and my body didn't absorb
00:25:27
it quite the way that it used to when I was in my early 20s. And so really kind of slowed down. You know that the idea
00:25:32
of a night out now for me is um you know I'll go out and have a few drinks. I
00:25:36
enjoy it. I slow down a bit and it's um probably if I went back to my 20s now
00:25:42
you you realize that I can't remember a lot of it and I'm not sure that that's
00:25:46
that was a great thing you know what did I miss out on or what did I do that I now can't remember that that might have
00:25:51
been a a good memory you know um so I think I think we we do need to have honest conversations around alcohol you
00:25:59
know and um I've I've met a lot of people who are kind of my age who've
00:26:03
given it up completely and I haven't gone that far still like to have a you know glass of wine on a Friday night or
00:26:08
a beer at the pub or whatever. Um but I I have definitely slowed down. Yeah. Yes. Same. I just find I get so much
00:26:16
more done and Yeah. Yeah. The um the few hours of pleasure you get. Yeah. It gets
00:26:22
to the point where Yeah. It's just not worth it. Yeah. Totally. Risk versus reward. Um let's talk about some of your
00:26:28
viral moments. So, um I've got a bunch of them here. First of all, this is probably number one on the uh I know
00:26:33
where this is going. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, I've got like one, two, three, four things here. Um,
00:26:42
we start with the spread your legs. Yeah, I knew you were going to start with that. So, this is when um you were
00:26:46
you were deputy prime minister? No, Grant Robertson was deputy prime minister. That's right. No, I was the
00:26:50
minister for co and and everything else and you know and education and a bunch of other things and uh we were doing
00:26:56
this press conference and you know we you do the press conferences every day at that point. We were doing them every
00:27:02
day and I think people didn't If you didn't see behind the scenes, you wouldn't realize how much went into
00:27:08
that. You know, for for us to do that one:00 briefing, we would generally start first thing in the morning.
00:27:13
There'd be meetings, there'd be online Zoom sessions, you'd be uh you know, and
00:27:17
then um we'd have our final kind of Zoom session at about 11:30 where they'd give
00:27:22
us the most recent up to- date. So, the Zoom session would bring in people from all around the country, people working
00:27:26
in the labs, people working in the MIQ, people working in the hospitals. We get all of that and it all kind of come down
00:27:33
at us at about 11:30 and then by about quart 12 Ashley and I would sit or whoever it was that was doing it. We
00:27:40
would sit down and we would kind of filter through it be like okay what are the main points we need to let people
00:27:45
know about? You'd put that into a script that you'd read at the start. What are
00:27:48
the things we're going to get questioned on? So it's hours of preparation. But
00:27:52
when you're doing it every day, you do get to that point where your head kind
00:27:58
of almost goes into a different zone. And sometimes things that that one was almost like an outof body experience
00:28:05
where I got asked this question and I was I was still thinking I think about the previous question that I'd been
00:28:10
asked asked and so I gave this answer and I I remember at the time thinking I've said something that's making people
00:28:15
snigger a little bit and I couldn't figure out what it was and then I felt my phone vibrating in my pocket
00:28:23
furiously and then we kept on going and we got through a few more questions and then Ashley was giving a long answer
00:28:29
about something and I thought I just check my phone. So, I got my phone out and I was standing there at the podium.
00:28:32
I looked at my phone and it was a message from a a prominent journalist um who basically just said, "Stretch your
00:28:40
legs." And suddenly the penny dropped and I realized what I had said. And we
00:28:46
still had like a good 10 minutes of press conference to get through and I sort of so I tried to sort of maintain a
00:28:51
straight face for the rest of the press conference and then I made a joke about it at the end. And it's just one of
00:28:56
those things where when you're focused on trying to you're trying to kind of
00:28:59
give out as much information as you can, but you're also trying to be accurate.
00:29:02
You're trying to make sure you don't say things that that that aren't right. And
00:29:07
yeah, and then sometimes the the what what seems like the inconsequential bit um ends up being quite consequential.
00:29:15
And so I got back to the office and everyone was just giving me heaps about it for days. And I I just think, you
00:29:20
know, like in politics, I think sometimes politicians are a bit too reluctant to stand up and say, "I made a
00:29:26
mistake or I got that wrong or I made myself look a bit silly." And I actually
00:29:32
think the public really respect you when you do. And so I thought, well, look, I've made this mistake. People are
00:29:39
having a lot of laughs about it. I'll just go along with that. And someone, like, it was literally a couple of days
00:29:44
after someone sent me the the first of the coffee mugs. And I thought, well, I'm just going to go with this. I took
00:29:50
the coffee mug to the press conference with me and I drunk from it at the press conference.
00:29:55
And again, that was just another moment which everybody, I think, quite enjoyed.
00:29:59
And I think, you know, politicians are human. We make mistakes, too. And we should be a bit less reluctant to admit
00:30:07
that. Oh, and it was good for you overall, I think. Yeah, I think so. I mean, it made us look more m hopefully
00:30:13
made me look a bit more human. Um, but are you are you beating yourself up at the beginning? Like like are you mad at
00:30:18
yourself for the making the mistake and then you realize it's actually a good
00:30:21
thing and it's brought a bit of light. That wasn't No, that on that one. Um,
00:30:24
actually I I was fine with it. I mean people were like, "Oh, was that deliberate?" And I was kind of like,
00:30:28
"No, it definitely wasn't." Um, but there were mistakes that we made during
00:30:33
the press conferences where I where I would go back and beat myself up. There's one that was an absolute shocker
00:30:39
where we'd made some decisions. we we're often making decisions and announcing
00:30:43
them more or less straight away. So, and and we'd made a decision. Um I had I was
00:30:48
lacking some of the basic kind of information. I made I said some I answered some questions wrong and
00:30:54
realized partway through the press conference that actually I I got some stuff wrong and I said to the pre people
00:31:02
in the press conference, it was being live stream people were watching at home. I said, "Look, we're just going to
00:31:06
stop for a minute because I actually think what I've said is wrong and I'm
00:31:08
just going to check that and then we're going to come back to it." and and I
00:31:11
kind of beat myself up about that for days now. I mean, I could have made it worse by not just saying I've made I've
00:31:16
made a mistake. And it's quite hard to do that when you're live on TV. Um, but
00:31:21
I should have been better prepared, you know, like I shouldn't have done that.
00:31:24
And so, you do beat yourself up about those moments. I think when where it's a
00:31:27
slip of the tongue and you just kind of say something that's a bit silly and and
00:31:30
and you can make fun of it, it it's not so bad. But when you when you do something that actually isn't genuinely
00:31:35
wrong, um, then you do tend to dwell on that a bit. I I've had um Dr. Bloomfield on the
00:31:41
podcast and he he talked about um the the co era um and in particular the nerves head experience on ZB mornings.
00:31:49
Yeah. And he said he'd get up maybe 4:00 or 3:00 in the morning and you know he'd
00:31:53
wake up and wouldn't be to go back to sleep and then he'd be briefed early. Um
00:31:56
yeah. What was your experience with um ZB mornings? Oh yeah. Well, I mean, Mike Hosking particularly seemed to like to
00:32:03
pinpoint the the most uh obscure little piece of information and then really quiz you on why you didn't know the
00:32:08
answer to the question that he was asking. And you know, that's hard because there are so many different bits
00:32:15
of information that you're trying to absorb in a day and you can't always
00:32:18
remember them off the top of your head. So I would um I would sit there to do my
00:32:22
morning briefing with them cuz on a wind on a Tuesday morning as I used to do those briefings with the media it was
00:32:28
there were about five media outlets and you do them all on a row bang bang bang and so I would be in the theater you
00:32:34
know cuz that's often the backdrop for them and they you do TV one first and or
00:32:38
Mike Hosking and then TV one and then Morning Report and then TV3 and it was all in a row and I would spread all my
00:32:45
notes out um when I was doing the radio ones. It's harder when you're on TV cuz
00:32:48
you can't just sort of pull out a piece of paper. But when you're doing the
00:32:51
radio ones, I'd have all these notes spread out with so that if I got asked this question, I could be, "Oh, grab
00:32:55
that piece of paper that's got the the particular fact that they want on it."
00:32:58
But if you don't have it, you know, it's it it gets it can get a bit hairy, but
00:33:04
you can never have all of the information. One of the things about CO was that things were moving so fast. We
00:33:10
regularly didn't have all of the information. You know, there would be a CO case detected in the community and
00:33:15
people would be like, well, who was it? Where was it? How many people they were in contact with? It's like, well, I
00:33:20
don't know that yet. That's what we're trying to figure out. And but people
00:33:23
would immediately want to know more. And unfortunately, I I guess it's part of
00:33:28
human nature there, too. In the absence of concrete information, people are very
00:33:32
quick to fill the void themselves. Yes. So, we had an issue with uh people who traveled between Oakland and Northland.
00:33:38
Um there were there were questions about um you know why they had done that and what their motivations were and whether
00:33:45
there were gangs involved. Oh, the sex workers, whether they were sex workers. And I remember standing there saying,
00:33:50
"I've got no evidence that there are gangs involved and I've got no evidence
00:33:52
that they're sex workers." Um and yet now, you know, 5 years later, I still
00:33:58
get people saying, "Are you going to apologize to those people you accused of
00:34:01
being sex workers?" I was like, "Well, I stood there and said that we had no
00:34:05
evidence that that was the case." Winston Peters on the other hand was in Northland at the time and he was making
00:34:09
those claims publicly. Now, now the anti-COVID people seem to think that he's their hero. Um, and yet he was the
00:34:15
one making those allegations and you know, but that's just the way kind of people just will fill the void. And so
00:34:23
one of the hardest parts of co was just encouraging people to just not fill the void if there wasn't information. If you
00:34:29
didn't know the answer to something, say, "Look, we don't know the answer to
00:34:32
that. We're working really hard to try and find the answer to that." Um but
00:34:35
there's still a lot we don't know then at that early phase of CO we didn't even
00:34:39
understand how the virus was being transmitted if you remember you know the early advice was that it was transmitted
00:34:44
by droplets um and so everyone was wiping down all their surfaces and all that kind of stuff and yet it became
00:34:50
clear after time over time that it was aerosol transmission. it was in the air. And so a lot of the early protection
00:34:58
stuff we were doing didn't really make sense, you know, um because wiping down
00:35:02
surfaces and stuff isn't going to make much difference if the virus is floating
00:35:05
around in the air. And so um but but you don't know that and so uh you're trying
00:35:10
to do the best you can with the information that you've got. Yeah. Another one of your um big viral
00:35:16
moments. Um I think this is just after maybe the day after Justindra Adun announced she was resigning as prime
00:35:20
minister and you were stopped in the street and was it Napier or Nelson? It was Napia. Yeah. And you had um Yeah.
00:35:26
Like Canterbury clothing company sweat pants on and Abberrombie and Fitch hoodie and uh service station glasses
00:35:32
speed dealers they called. Dirty dogs. Yeah. From the Z station down the road. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So this is you
00:35:37
just going for a morning walk. It was. Yeah. And look, I it had been a big sort of 24 hours, so Justinda had announced
00:35:44
that she was going to stand down. Um there was some conversation going on about who should replace her. Um I think
00:35:50
at that point it was starting to look like it was going to be me. You know, we decided as a team that we would make a
00:35:56
consensus decision and I think that was the right thing to do. You know, I don't
00:36:00
think anyone wanted to see the Labour Party having a big scrap. You know, um particularly given where we were at with
00:36:05
everything. You know, we were exiting from the co elimination strategy. We were reopening the border. There was a
00:36:10
lot going on and I think we we couldn't afford to basically look like we were
00:36:14
focused on ourselves. So, we decided that we were going to make a consensus decision. A lot of phone calls
00:36:19
overnight, a lot of people chatting to each other and everything. And it was sort of heading in in my direction uh at
00:36:24
that point. And I just needed to kind of clear my head a little bit. And I thought, well, I'm probably going to
00:36:29
when I get to the airport, the media are probably all going to be lined up at the
00:36:33
airport filming me getting onto the plane and and everything. And um so I thought I'll just go for a walk along
00:36:39
the waterfront. So I thought I'll just slip out the back uh and and I and I man
00:36:44
I made it most of the way down the road. I I bypassed all the media and then just
00:36:49
coincidentally there were some there was a a TV journalist from TV3 walking back
00:36:54
to the hotel having been somewhere else filming something else and next thing you know cameras on and I was kind of
00:37:00
like oh okay here we go. Um, so I just sort of I just sort of owned that. But that I mean that was that was an amazing
00:37:07
um kind of 48 hours really. I remember getting onto the plane uh in Napia, not sure what was going to happen, but
00:37:15
getting a text message literally as they were closing the plane door um basically
00:37:19
to say that I was going to be the only nominee. And then they closed the plane door and told us we had to turn our
00:37:25
phones off. I was like, "Oh, you've got to be kidding." you know, like and so
00:37:29
for the it was the longest flight ever from Napia to Wellington. I was just sort of staring out the window uh
00:37:34
contemplating what was about to happen and uh you know it turned out to be quite the roller coaster from there. So
00:37:41
did you did you have a heads up about that? Like did Justinda did you have any inkling that that was about to happen?
00:37:45
We'd had a chat before Christmas um and it was after parliament had finished for
00:37:49
the year. We we uh there was just a few of us. We got together and she indicated
00:37:54
at that point that she was going to think about it over Christmas. Uh, so she hadn't made a decision, but she was
00:37:59
going to be thinking about it over Christmas. And um, and uh, my my good friend Grant was in the same
00:38:06
conversation and he said that he was also going to be thinking about it over Christmas. And I thought, well, that
00:38:10
that was a bit of a surprise to me because I'd always assumed that if Justinda at any point stood down that he
00:38:15
would want to do it. Uh, and then he rang me mid January and said, you know, I've thought about it. I'm not going to
00:38:22
do it if Justinda stands down. Um and then of course just into confirmed it at the caucus that she had decided that she
00:38:28
was going to stand down. So um I'd had a bit of I'd had a summer thinking about
00:38:32
it. You know, if she does stand down, what will I do? Um but yeah, it was still it's still a pretty momentous
00:38:38
thing. Um and not something I'd ever really anticipated. Um I you had things
00:38:44
that I wanted to achieve in politics. I hadn't necessarily ever thought that I'd
00:38:48
want to be prime minister. I mean I think all politicians think about it. You know, I think any MP who who says,
00:38:54
"I've never thought about being prime minister," clearly is not telling you
00:38:56
the truth. At least at the beginning of your career, everyone that gets into parliament, everyone thinks about it.
00:39:01
Whether they aspire to it or not, they think, could I do that job? Would I want it? Everyone thinks about it. And I had
00:39:06
as well. And I'd kind of when Justinda had taken over as leader, I'd kind of
00:39:10
decided that okay, this was probably me. This was, you know, my role was to be one of the team. And uh I hadn't
00:39:17
necessarily thought that I would end up becoming prime minister. But then when she stood down and we kind of looked
00:39:22
around, it was kind of it almost became like a logical thing. I was probably outside of Justindra Grant, probably the
00:39:28
next highest profile person in the government, probably in the best position to try and step in mid-flight,
00:39:34
so to speak. Um, and so I decided to do it. I absolutely loved it. Um, I had eight months at it. Um, probably only
00:39:42
about six if you take out the election campaign because in the election campaign, you know, you just focused on
00:39:46
getting elected. So I had about six months as is genuinely being prime minister and
00:39:51
absolutely loved it and I actually think yeah if I get reelected at the next election have a chance to be prime
00:39:58
minister again I think I'll be much better at it for having had that kind of
00:40:01
six months at it because having six months at it working out what we did well what we did wrong uh and being able
00:40:08
to go back and go okay if I get to do it again next time how would I do it differently I think that actually gives
00:40:13
gives me a head start in a way that most incoming prime ministers don't the learning curve is steeper than you ever
00:40:19
could imagine. And I had been a senior minister in government and so and had worked really closely with Justinda and
00:40:25
sort of thought that I knew what I was stepping into. You don't until you do
00:40:28
it. And it's it's a much steeper learning curve. Everyone I've watched,
00:40:31
you know, Christopher Lux and I'm not going to get political about it. Um, and
00:40:34
I'm not going to criticize him on this podcast cuz I don't think that's the
00:40:37
spirit of the kind of conversation we're having, but I've watched him and I've
00:40:40
watched him go through some of the things that I have done as well, I went through as well. And it it doesn't
00:40:45
matter what your background is, it's you know, chief executive of an airline,
00:40:50
senior government minister, you can have done some amazing things. Being prime minister still is just a whole new
00:40:55
world. Yeah. Since you mentioned um his name, it looks like he gets he gets angry. E looks like he gets flustered. I
00:41:02
I think so. I I I think, you know, he probably suffers from what a lot of people suffer early on in their
00:41:07
political career. It hasn't been in politics very long. And that I think sometimes you you need to just step back
00:41:14
and take a deep breath from time to time. I think you can't take all criticism personally. You can't get
00:41:19
defensive. It's natural to get defensive. We all have our days when we're defensive. I mean, I'll go back to
00:41:24
the co period. We were talking about those daily briefings. You know, there will be days there where I was more
00:41:29
defensive than I should have been. Um and then there are other days when you're very open. Um you have to try and
00:41:34
lean towards the openness, you know, um in politics. If you if you kind of get defensive,
00:41:39
then it's it's just uh you're not going to be able to connect with people.
00:41:46
Um yeah, I want to get more into the um your time as um prime minister, but one last thing on that. So John Key left the
00:41:52
same way as Justinda did. Yeah. So they got elected and then with about a year to go stood down. Yeah. What's what's
00:41:57
your take on that? Um I think again just reflecting on it from experience, it's
00:42:02
really it's good for them. It's really hard on the next person. I've never had
00:42:05
this conversation with Bill English, but he would have found himself in the same
00:42:09
zone that I did, which is suddenly thrust into the prime minister's job and then he got a little bit longer than I
00:42:14
did and that John Key stood down. I think uh it was October, November or something, wasn't it? So, he at least
00:42:19
had the summer holidays to kind of prepare for the election year. I I became prime minister end of January. We
00:42:25
had flooding, we had cyclones, we had all sorts of things go wrong and then was straight into an election campaign.
00:42:31
That's really hard because you're kind of learning the job at the same time as
00:42:34
dealing with a series of major issues and trying to get reelected. Um and that that is really hard. So, uh I think
00:42:43
maybe um you know I I I respect them for just walking away from it. I do. Um but
00:42:50
it's it it it is quite hard to take over in those circumstances. And that's a
00:42:54
hospital pass, isn't it? Yeah. And I didn't realize how hard it was going to
00:42:57
be until I was actually in the midst of doing it. Um, you you also learn you learn a lot about your people as prime
00:43:02
minister. You know more about your colleagues than you would know as as just as one of their colleagues. You you
00:43:06
you learn a lot more about their strengths and weaknesses very quickly uh when you're the prime minister. And um
00:43:12
trying to do all of that at the same time as you know get get your government reelected and deal with the issues we
00:43:19
had to deal with. You know, the cost of living stuff was really hard. Um the cyclone made that worse. And then uh you
00:43:25
know the flooding in Oakland threw up a whole lot of challenges that clearly we still haven't grappled with as a
00:43:30
country. Um and uh and then we were dealing with the tail end of the pandemic as well. So I think all of that
00:43:37
made for a really bumpy 2023 for me. I've got another couple of viral moments. What What do you think they
00:43:43
would be? I'm just trying to think. You've covered the two ones that that
00:43:47
are most familiar to me. So I'm I'm going to be interested in hearing what
00:43:50
you come up with next. Okay. Okay. There's the um the summer press conference. Oh yeah. Right. So that was
00:43:55
that was I mean that was right at the heart of one of those um periods where co just never stopped sometimes. And so
00:44:03
we were doing I was doing a press conference I think on Christmas Eve and on Boxing Day. And I was staying up at
00:44:08
the beach with my parents because it just made life easier. Um it meant that uh they they my kids were still getting
00:44:15
their summer holiday and still being loved and cared for while I was busy doing work stuff. And I woke up uh and I
00:44:22
we had worked out on very early that morning that I had to do a press conference. So we'd called a press
00:44:27
conference and then I suddenly realized I'm at the beach. I don't have a suit or
00:44:31
anything. And we were announcing something quite significant. I can't remember exactly what it was. And I
00:44:37
thought I need to look like, you know, like I can't just walk out of here in,
00:44:41
you know, jandles in a t-shirt. I do need to look like we're taking this seriously. So, I zoomed home to
00:44:46
Upperart, grabbed a suit, zoomed back to mom and dad's, had a shower, had a shave, threw it all on, but it meant
00:44:52
that I was a bit late arriving at this press conference and I didn't want to
00:44:56
have the media at home cuz I didn't want my kids to be in it. And so, we had
00:45:00
called it in a local park and to get from the mom and dad's to the local park, you had to walk down through a
00:45:04
little bush track. And so, and of course, I was late um because I was only 5 minutes late, but the live streams had
00:45:10
already started. And, you know, such a Kiwi moment. my mom walked down to tell the media that I was going to be late.
00:45:16
Um, and so that was the first thing that the live stream was my mom saying, "Oh,
00:45:19
he's just he's just getting changed. He's just put on a suit. He's going to
00:45:21
be a little bit late." Um, and then of course me walking out of the bush then
00:45:25
became the next thing. Um, and I I remember the I think the first meme that hit was literally minutes afterwards and
00:45:32
it was that one of Homer Simpson, you know, walking backwards into the hedge and um and then it just sort of it it
00:45:38
grew from there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it was just quite funny that I suppose the whole just juxosition. I mean, it was
00:45:43
the middle of summer and Yeah. Yeah. You're looking so fresh coming straight
00:45:46
out of the bush. Um, the other one I've got is the Spider-Man meme. Yeah. Did
00:45:50
you do that or did you have like some some young buck in your team? I confess I confess that was one of the the staff
00:45:55
came up with that and um you know, it is it is quite good fun. You know, I think
00:46:00
again politics sometimes descends towards the absurd and every now and then it doesn't hurt to kind of call out
00:46:07
the absurd and uh in that case, you know, it was just it was a silly question and it deserved a silly answer.
00:46:13
Yeah. Um Yeah. Oh, that's that's good. I I suppose the other one is probably the
00:46:19
Coke Zero and sausage roll thing. Yeah. It's what's what is that do you just go
00:46:24
to functions where that's on offer? Well, it it certainly is now. I um it's
00:46:28
becoming your thing. Yeah. I always had a a soft spot for sausage rolls and I happened to say that I think reasonably
00:46:33
early on when I became prime minister and um and suddenly everywhere I went people was like, "Oh, we we we've got
00:46:41
your sausage roll." And it almost became like a national competition to see who
00:46:44
could make the best sausage roll. And I put on about 10 kilos. And but I mean campaigns are brutal in that regard
00:46:53
because you're you're you're living out of a suitcase. you're never stopping to
00:46:58
properly eat, you know, so you're eating on the go all the time. You're eating in
00:47:01
the back of a car. You're eating while you're standing up. You're eating while
00:47:04
you're running between things and it's generally crap food. Um, by the way, I
00:47:09
say it's lovely food. It's very tasty, but it's not the healthiest food. Um,
00:47:13
and so I I put on about 10 kilos and I still haven't quite lost them. You know,
00:47:17
it's the thing you get to your mid 40s and suddenly you can't just lose weight
00:47:21
anymore. You it's it's it's so much harder. And is is Coke Zero like your
00:47:25
drink of choice? You love your soft drinks. Yeah, I I do still drink too much Coke Zero. So do I. I thought it
00:47:30
was a kids drink as well. And now here I am in my 50s. I still drink way too much. Yeah, I mean as a university
00:47:35
student I drunk a lot of V. And at least I don't drink that anymore cuz that's
00:47:38
really not great. But but Coke Zero. It's my kind of my daily I don't drink
00:47:42
coffee. I'm probably a bit of an outlier like that. So that's my daily caffeine
00:47:45
hit is drinking Coke Zero. Yeah. So your first um political career, so we're
00:47:51
jumping all all around the place here, but that's fine. um was um working for
00:47:55
Helen Clark as an adviser straight out of university. No, I actually started with Trevor Mard first. So I did about
00:48:01
three years working for Trevor Malard. He was my local MP and minister of education and so that was my first I'd
00:48:07
gone off and worked elsewhere. I was living in New Plymouth. Um I kind of missed Wellington. Wellington's kind of
00:48:12
home for me and um sort of through the the grapevine heard that there was this job going working for Trevor who was my
00:48:20
local MP. So I went and did the interview and he offered me the job and so I went and worked for him as a
00:48:26
political adviser and learned a lot about politics from Trevor. Trevor's one
00:48:31
of those um uh confusing people sometimes where his public persona and who he is as a person are often quite
00:48:36
different. So he's quite brash publicly public he's quite brash. But behind the
00:48:39
scenes he's one of the most caring, thoughtful uh mentor type figures you could come across. Really treats his
00:48:46
staff exceptionally well. Uh will always defend his staff. I remember making a mistake when I was working for him once
00:48:53
and uh it was a mistake that ended up having a public kind of um implications for him. He never ever blamed his staff.
00:49:01
You know, if if a mistake had been made in his office, it was his responsibility. And I just thought that
00:49:07
that is that I really respected that about him. And so I've tried to sort of
00:49:12
emulate that in the way that I do politics. And it's not his public persona. his public persona is, you
00:49:17
know, is someone who's really kind of harsh and brash and and everything, but
00:49:20
behind the scenes, actually, he's a he's a really really decent um thoughtful
00:49:25
person. Was he the sprinkler guy? Yeah, turned the sprinklers on during the parliamentary problem. Again, he has it
00:49:31
was kind of funny. Like all people, he has his moments. Um and when I was working for him, he had a few of those
00:49:36
moments and you'd be like some days I'd tell him not to do something and and
00:49:40
that would be the exactly the thing that he would do. But um you know, everybody
00:49:43
has their their weaknesses, I guess. Yeah. Um, I just realized my my dog's done a a poo on the uh the tiles. I'm
00:49:50
just going to put my cup over it. I'll clean it up afterwards. How's your body
00:49:53
temperature? Yeah, good. Good as gold. Yeah. Yeah. So then um so yeah, Helen Clark.
00:50:03
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What was your experience of working with her? I was only in her office reasonably briefly.
00:50:08
Um I came back so after working for Trevor for about 3 years I went and did my OE traveled around the world and then
00:50:14
um had run out of money as you do. Um was in a job that wasn't particularly well paid in the UK and thought and then
00:50:20
uh a friend of mine contacted me and said someone's going on maternity leave
00:50:24
in Steve Mahari's office would you come back and just cover maternity leave and
00:50:28
that happened to coincide with the Kiwi summer and I thought oh I'll come home
00:50:31
for the summer and then I might go back to the UK after that. And then a whole lot of things all happened at the same
00:50:36
time. So one of the things that happened was um Steve Mahari announced that he was retiring. Um Helen Clark uh announc
00:50:44
basically there was a job going in her office so I went to work for her and uh Paul Swain who was one of our two local
00:50:51
MPs in the hut where I grew up announced that he was retiring as well. And so a whole lot of things happened at once.
00:50:57
The the minister who I was working for left. I went to the prime minister's office. I got selected as the candidate
00:51:03
uh out in Rumataka and you know 2007 that was end of 2007 was one of those sort of periods where uh a whole year's
00:51:13
worth of activity seems to happen in a single month for me that was one of them and um yeah and then the political
00:51:19
roller coaster started and it's never stopped. But what was your experience of
00:51:23
um working alongside her? Like did she did you have much to do with her personally or was she terrifying as a
00:51:28
young you know young guy working on her teeth? I'd be fair to say Helen set her
00:51:31
expectations very high and she you certainly knew if you hadn't met them. Um but I I was only there for in the end
00:51:38
of about 6 months because once as we got closer to the campaign it was just too hard, you know. Um being in the prime
00:51:44
minister's office is a is an unrelenting job if you're a staff member and I
00:51:49
wanted to be out the campaigning you you know, I wanted to be out there getting myself elected and it just became
00:51:54
impossible to do that. So, I ended up dropping right back to part-time and then eventually just taking leave and
00:51:59
and and um and quitting effectively um and becoming a full-time candidate. So, I was only there for probably 6 months
00:52:07
at most. Um but I found um you know, Helen was great to work with, but as I said, she she let you know exactly what
00:52:13
her expectations were. I I had a guy on the podcast a couple of months ago called Lance Budet. used to be involved
00:52:18
with the police and diplomatic protection stuff for a while and he looked after Helen Clark and he said
00:52:22
some days she'd just go missing and they'd be panicked like where she's gone
00:52:25
and she would have snuck out to the gym or something. Yeah, that's right. Yeah.
00:52:28
Harder to do that these. I used to I think the DPS used to get a bit freaked out when um that I was going to do that.
00:52:33
So, you know, if I was at home uh and the car sort of disappeared from the garage cuz someone else in the house had
00:52:38
gone out that I'd get a text message from them and are you still at home? You
00:52:41
know, they were worried that I'd somehow just sort of slipped them. Um I never
00:52:44
did it um because I thought that would be really unfair on them. But um you know uh I think they do an amazing job
00:52:51
the DPS and it's a it's a tough gig. Yeah. Yeah. So um so was it the 2008
00:52:56
election that you got in? Yeah. So I got elected in 2008. Yeah. So 2008 same time
00:53:00
as um justinda uh this was John Keyy's third term. Phil G was the leader of the
00:53:04
Labour party at the time. What what are your rec recollections of that? Like your first first time you walked through
00:53:09
the doors of parliament as an elected MP. It's funny because I mean Justinda
00:53:12
and Grant and I have been friends before we became MPs and Justinda at that point
00:53:17
was uh she'd been campaigning up in um Muta Matter I think and so she came down
00:53:22
and uh the night before our maiden speeches she came in uh she stayed at my house that I was renting in um in Upper
00:53:30
Hut and was asking my opinion on what she should wear for uh for her maiden speech and she had all these different
00:53:37
dresses that she was trying on and was asking my views and I was just like You're really asking the wrong guy. You
00:53:42
know, I know nothing about any of this. Um, and uh, you you buy your sunglasses at a service. Exactly. I buy I buy
00:53:50
clothes at the warehouse. You know, I'm I'm not really the guy to ask. Um, but I
00:53:55
remember the feeling of walking into Parliament's debating chamber for the very first time. And I remember it
00:54:00
really well because I still get the same feeling now. You know, it's it's that
00:54:04
enormous sense of responsibility, but that enormous sense of possibility. And you know, when you think about all of
00:54:11
the debates that have been held in there over the years, the huge decisions that
00:54:16
have been made by Parliament over the over the the decades, it's hard not to
00:54:21
kind of feel both that weight of responsibility, but also that that sense of possibility.
00:54:27
Why why did you end up leaning towards Labor? Like I feel like um we're quite
00:54:30
centralist here, right? You know, Labor and National, it's kind of Pepsi and
00:54:34
Coke in a way. There's not too Yeah. Yeah. Why Why Labor? Yeah. I mean, I think the political spectrum in New
00:54:39
Zealand is is uh shorter than it is in other countries, and I think that's a
00:54:42
good thing for New Zealand stability. Um, but I guess if you put the if you were going to put uh Labor and National
00:54:48
on the a values continuum where national would lean more towards individual rights and individual
00:54:55
individualism, I do tend to lean more towards the collective. So, I think that we're all going to be better off if
00:55:02
we're all better off. You know, I think if that idea that you just pursue your
00:55:06
your own self-interest and that everything will work out okay, I don't think that I I think history certainly
00:55:11
last 40 years of history has shown us that's not the case. Um and that actually we will all be better off if we
00:55:16
are actually looking out for each other. And so it's that kind of basic value
00:55:20
proposition where where I would differ from national. Um I I'm more of a collectivist and they'd be more
00:55:26
individualistic in the way they think about things. Is it is this from your upbringing or is it something at
00:55:30
Waterloo Primary School? or like does it go that far back or yeah I mean I think
00:55:34
we all get our values from a lot from our parents and um you know I'm very grateful to the to my parents for the
00:55:40
values that they raised us with. So, uh, empathy has been an really important part in my life. You know, one of the
00:55:45
things that, uh, my mom would ask us all the time as kids is if someone did that
00:55:50
to you, how would you feel about that? And, man, it's amazing how much of humanity seems to have lost the ability
00:55:56
to think about that. We do things to other people and and without thinking, how would I feel if that was me, you
00:56:02
know? And so, that's something that I've always tried to stick with in my life.
00:56:05
Okay? You know, when I'm making decisions, how would I feel if I was on the other end of these decisions? And
00:56:11
that empathy I think is really important and it's an underrated quality in politics. I I think um there's also just
00:56:18
a basic kind of sense of fairness. My my mom's dad, my uh grandfather used to to
00:56:24
talk about money and he would he had two phrases which I'll remember. He died
00:56:28
when we were quite young but I still remember this. He used to talk about money. He say it's made round to go
00:56:32
round. Um and the second thing that he would say about it is if you've got more
00:56:36
than you need, you've got someone else's share. And I kind of think I I kind of
00:56:41
believe that, you know, I I think I I've got no problem with people doing well,
00:56:44
you know, making a good comfortable life for themselves. People people getting wealthy, that's great. You know,
00:56:49
everyone should have the opportunity to do that. But when you get to the point where we're at now where the inequality
00:56:54
is so great that three people standing on the podium next to Donald Trump when he was sworn in have more wealth between
00:57:00
those three people than half of the rest of the population of the United States.
00:57:05
That's just not that doesn't pass the fairness test to me. So where were you when you found out
00:57:14
um what year was the election where Justinda became prime minister? That was 2017. 2017. Yeah. Where were you when
00:57:20
that happened? So So there was the election then there was negotiations and ultimately um the coalition was formed
00:57:25
with you know Winston and Justinda and Yeah. who else was it? The Greens. There was the Greens. Yeah. So where were you?
00:57:31
I I'd taken the kids up to Staglands. fantastic little wildlife park in Upper
00:57:34
Hut which has no cell phone coverage. Um, and I done darling now. Surely there is. I'd done that deliberately cuz I was
00:57:41
just like, I'm not going to sit here just waiting for a message to come through. I'm going to go and remove
00:57:46
myself from it. And anyway, we got back down from Staglands with the kids at about 5:30 and there was still no I sort
00:57:53
of fully expected as soon as we came back into range, I'd get a message and we'd know the outcome. And frankly, I
00:57:58
wasn't feeling optimistic. Um, were you? Why not? because numbers. So a a national New Zealand first government
00:58:06
was going to be kind of cleaner in terms of the numbers than a Labor New Zealand
00:58:10
first green government was going to be and and I just thought the weight would probably lean towards the the cleaner
00:58:15
option and you know just in terms of numbers and uh yeah and then I got home I thought I'll watch the 6:00 news and
00:58:23
of course Winston he loves a loves a moment does Winston. Um from memory I think he announced it right live in the
00:58:29
middle of the 6:00 news. So, I was literally sitting on a lazy boy chair at home watching the news when Winston
00:58:33
Peters came on and he started to speak and the things he said surprised me and I I I he was a couple of minutes into
00:58:40
his speech cuz he didn't say it till right at the very end. He's a couple of
00:58:43
minutes into his speech and I thought he's going to go with us. And as as he
00:58:48
went on, I was like, he's definitely going to go with us. And that was that.
00:58:53
Yeah. And what are you what are you thinking at that time or what do you do then? because you realize your life is
00:58:58
going to change significantly overnight. Yeah, I mean I guess there's a sort of a
00:59:02
whole lot of friends that showed up uh you know and we had a few drinks that night as you might imagine but yeah that
00:59:08
suddenly that again I mentioned this a lot that sense of responsibility politics you know there is a huge weight
00:59:13
of responsibility you feel in politics and that weight of responsibility sort of started to descend quite quickly you
00:59:20
realize your life's going to change but also now you're you've got a you've got
00:59:23
a huge responsibility and I did a TV interview I think two days later where I continued to speak as though I was in
00:59:29
opposition about all of the things that we wanted to do and suddenly realize that I couldn't just think out loud
00:59:34
anymore you know and this is something that we do need to I think re recognizing those who are in government
00:59:42
whomever they are you can't just think out loud you can't shoot from the hip if
00:59:47
you're going to say something once you say something it's a government announcement and so if you're if you're
00:59:51
if you're deflecting a question it's not because you're trying to be obstructive
00:59:54
it's it's often because you need to go away and you need to get your ducks in a
00:59:57
row before you actually answer the question properly and and I think that really kind of struck me in those first
01:00:05
few days. Okay, now I've got to make sure that everything I say properly stacks up. You know, I can't just uh
01:00:10
shoot from the hip so much. What portfolios did you end up with straight away? So I was minister of education, uh
01:00:16
minister for state services which is the the the public service, uh leader of the
01:00:21
house, so running parliament for the government and uh ministerial services which is sort of an administrative role
01:00:27
for the government. Basically just making sure ministers all get what they need, the support that they need. Yeah.
01:00:32
You sort of got a reputation as being like a safe pair of hands like Mr. Reliability, Mr. Fix It. Your um
01:00:38
workload must have increased like exponentially like almost overnight. Oh, massive. And and those jobs were huge
01:00:43
because I was the first minister of education in several decades that did the entirety of the portfolio. So before
01:00:49
that it had often been split, you know, someone would do tertiary education, someone would do early childhood
01:00:53
education, someone would do schools. I did the lot. And so that was a big a big portfolio in itself. Um but I I really
01:01:01
wanted to do that because I I'd spent five years as the opposition education
01:01:04
spokesperson and I had a lot that I wanted to do that kind of connected the bits together. I think that that pathway
01:01:10
between school and whatever happens next is pretty patchy in New Zealand and I wanted to fix that. Um, did we fix it?
01:01:17
No, we didn't. And I think I I left the education portfolio when I became prime
01:01:22
minister somewhat frustrated because it felt like we were making really good progress in the first two years and then
01:01:27
co came along and everything just stopped. Our ability to do any kind of meaningful education reform just stopped
01:01:33
and for the next three years we were just focused on keeping the system going. You know, I' I'd talk to school
01:01:39
principles and they'd say, "When I get out of bed in the morning, I count how
01:01:42
many kids are coming to school. I count how many teachers I've got available and
01:01:45
I hope that I can make that add up because, you know, co was just turning everything upside down and we sort of
01:01:51
spent 3 years going through that. So I left the portfolio really frustrated that we hadn't been able to do the stuff
01:01:56
that I wanted to do and you know I hope back in government next time that we will be able to come back to some of
01:02:02
those things because you know we can't keep doing the same things in education we've been doing for the
01:02:08
last 50 years and expect that we're going to get a different outcome. The world's changed reading, writing, math,
01:02:13
very important foundational skills but not enough. Kids need to learn critical thinking. It's all very well to say you
01:02:19
can read something on the internet, but how do you know whether it's true? You
01:02:23
know, we actually need we need to teach kids how to critically evaluate stuff. Kids have got to learn about the skills
01:02:30
they're going to need for the world that they're going to live in, not the world
01:02:33
we were living in 50 years ago. And I we've got a lot of unfinished business
01:02:37
there. Yeah. Well, there's that quote from Einstein, like the definition of madness
01:02:41
is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Um, yes. So, it's around this time in the
01:02:46
conversation that um was it David Clark, was he the previous co guy? Yeah. So, he
01:02:51
went for a mountain bike ride or something. So, he he was dealt with swiftly and you got put on the job. Um
01:02:57
Justinda must have really liked you e or or trusted you. There's a there's a bit
01:03:01
of a story behind that. So I went and spoke to David um as part of the you know small group of ministers um who
01:03:08
sort of dealt with these things and I we we had a beer in his office and I I just
01:03:12
said look David I am worried about where this is all going for you um cuz he's he
01:03:17
was a friend and I really respect David and he'd kind of got himself into a bit
01:03:21
of a pickle and a lot of that was unfair but sometimes politics is just unfair and I thought it was the the public
01:03:27
sentiment that had sort of suddenly swung against him I thought was actually really unfair but it had happened and
01:03:32
politics can be like that and we had a discussion and his his one of his major concerns was well if I step down who's
01:03:39
going to do this he had all these sort of balls in there and he didn't want to
01:03:42
see things falling apart just because he had suddenly departed and so over the space of the next sort of 12 hours or so
01:03:49
there was a number of conversations and um you know he indicated to me that he thought I should do it. I went to
01:03:55
Justinda and had that conversation where she sort of gave me that raised eyebrow
01:03:59
thing. Um, which it was effectively, you know, my instruction. Um, and so I ended
01:04:04
up picking up the health portfolio. And man, just becoming Minister of Health is a
01:04:12
big thing. Becoming Minister of Health right in the middle of a pandemic. Um, that was something else altogether. But
01:04:19
I did I I said because you know I I did have this frustration around education where I felt like we we had we were on
01:04:25
our way to achieving some great things but we weren't there yet and I didn't
01:04:30
want to give that up and so I said look I will do health for for you until the election and the election was only 4
01:04:36
months away. So I will do this until the election um and then you can make someone else minister of health after
01:04:41
election. It'll give you the stability. It means that I can and and and the education work program we had was at
01:04:47
that point where actually the ministry of education in schools and stuff needed some time to go away and and actually
01:04:52
just do the work that we're asking of them. So I thought I can manage this for
01:04:55
4 months. Well I would go home every night with you know piles of paper this thick and I'd be there at 3:00 in the
01:05:01
morning thinking maybe this is maybe I've bitten off more than I can chew here. But we got through to the election
01:05:06
and then um justinda said to me I really want you to be Minister of Health. um you know we can give education to
01:05:12
someone else and I said I really don't want to do that because um you know I I
01:05:17
I want to see this through and co was only going to in my view at that time co was you know another six months this
01:05:25
will all be over this pandemic will all be over and and life will get back to normal and I want to go back to doing
01:05:29
education again and so we we reached a compromise little became minister of health I kept the responsibility for co
01:05:36
and I kept being minister of education I never imagined at that point that we'd
01:05:40
still dealing with CO 2 years later and had I known that I probably would have actually made some different decisions
01:05:46
about that. Um the education reforms that we um wanted to do just kind of got stuck and we just couldn't progress them
01:05:56
because of co and it wasn't just because of lack of time on my part. I would have
01:06:00
made the time to do it. It was just that you couldn't ask schools to do major
01:06:03
reform when they're when they're just functioning dayto-day. And so I left that portfolio very
01:06:09
frustrated, but I also just never imagined that CO would have lasted for two years. And we probably would have
01:06:13
made different decisions about how we set up the response if we'd known it was
01:06:17
going to be nearly 3 years. Yeah, hindsight's a bit of a pointless game, but um with the benefit of hindsight,
01:06:24
like did did we keep the measures up for too long? Oh, I think I actually think we got the first bit of co really I
01:06:30
think we you know the first year we were the envy of the world. always lessons to learn, but that
01:06:35
first 18 months, I reckon we nailed it. I really do. I'm really proud of it. But
01:06:40
the exit from elimination was the bit that we didn't get right. So when we when once CO started to spread in the
01:06:46
community, things moved really fast and we weren't keeping up with how fast that
01:06:50
was moving. And I think it was because we'd we'd got so far with our very
01:06:55
cautious approach when we'd made some bold decisions in the beginning that had
01:06:58
worked and then we had been very cautious thereafter and that had served the country incredibly well but once co
01:07:05
started to spread that cautious approach just wasn't and and we were too slow to
01:07:09
adapt to that and um probably the two things where I think if I could go back and do them differently um one would be
01:07:18
how we treated Oakland at the end of that that final lockdown I think we could have um we could have still had
01:07:24
the boundary around Oakland but given people more freedom within Oakland, you know, so as long as people were staying
01:07:30
in Oakland, not spreading around the rest of the country, more freedom there. And then we probably could have released
01:07:34
that boundary around Oakland earlier. Um and then the international border, I think we had a plan around how we were
01:07:42
going to open the reopen the border that was stepped us through what was a logical sequence and we we bought that
01:07:47
forward, but we stuck roughly to the plan. uh even once CO was spreading in the in within the New Zealand community
01:07:53
and I think we probably should have been a bit more arbitrary and and we were trying to balance too many things. Um
01:08:01
it's an interesting dynamic. I've reflected on this a bit when we were in
01:08:05
the height of co we were basically responsible for everything and it meant that we wanted everything to run
01:08:11
smoothly and we accepted responsibility for everything to run smoothly. when we got to the end and CO has started to
01:08:18
spread there there came a time when we had to release that and be like it's not
01:08:23
our responsibility and if things don't run smoothly that's not our responsibility either and the
01:08:27
international border was one of those. So the airlines were saying to us things like we need 6 weeks because we haven't
01:08:32
got any planes and if you just reopen the border we're not going to be able to
01:08:36
cope with the influx of demand. At that point we probably should have said well that's not actually the government's
01:08:41
problem but we didn't. We we took that on and we tried to to work with the airlines to sequence the border
01:08:46
reopening in a way that was going to work for the airlines as well which meant we got blamed for the fact that
01:08:51
people couldn't come back into the country when actually in many cases it was there were other constraints and we
01:08:56
were trying to make it smooth and sometimes I think it was impossible to make that kind of return to normal a
01:09:04
smooth journey. It was always going to be a bit bumpy and a bit messy. Yeah. So, the prime minister stuff. Um,
01:09:10
yeah, we'll get back to that part now. I think this is the fun part of the Chris
01:09:13
Hipkin story. Your first stint at prime minister. Maybe not the last. I just hope not. Um, yes. So, what's the
01:09:19
process? So, there's like an internal vote thing or you're the only name
01:09:22
that's put forward. Yeah. So, what happened? I mean, there can be a vote. So, the Labour Party's rules indicate
01:09:27
that if twothirds of the MPs agree who a person to become the leader, then that's
01:09:32
the decision made. If they don't, then it goes out to a wider vote of party members and so on. uh in the end we got
01:09:39
to a position where it was unanimous. So there I was the only candidate. So I found that out um I'm just trying to
01:09:46
remember exactly what the sequence of days was. I think it was a Saturday that I did my press conference at parliament
01:09:50
but I was sun Saturday or Sunday but I had found out coming back that that was likely to happen. Nominations I think
01:09:56
closed on the Friday night. Um and then I was able to do a press conference out on the four quarter parliament to say
01:10:02
I'm the only nominee so it's me. And then the um the Labour Party caucus, all
01:10:07
of our MPs got together. I think it was on the Monday and the vote got put and of course cuz there has to be a vote,
01:10:13
you know, in order to confirm that it was unanim unanimous and it was it was all done and dusted at that point. So
01:10:18
before you you phone the media when you when you sort of first get an inkling that you're going to be the prime
01:10:22
minister like who who do you call? You call your parents. Are they the first call? Yeah, I mean I had been talking to
01:10:28
them um sort of throughout it. Um I'd been talking to a couple of my you know
01:10:32
close friends uh and you know a few colleagues as well. Um so obviously I was regularly talking to justinder and
01:10:38
grant through that process. Um and uh yeah it was it was pretty big moment really. Yeah. Yeah. What's your parents
01:10:46
reaction when it becomes official? Like do they cry on the phone? They must be so proud right? They they were very
01:10:50
proud but also um very nervous. I mean they've they've watched me in politics
01:10:54
for what at that point 14 years they've been watching me in politics and they
01:10:57
kind of knew what I was taking on. So uh I think they they were both proud but also apprehensive about what might
01:11:02
happen and um because the the scrutiny you get as prime minister is like nothing else. So I think they were a
01:11:10
little sort of worried about that and um uh but uh so we know we had conversations about that but I mean the
01:11:18
scrutiny is phenomenal. Like I I don't again you sort of watch it but you don't
01:11:23
realize how it feels until you're actually doing it. that that thing where you step out of a car at an event and
01:11:29
suddenly there's a camera on you and there's a camera on you pretty much
01:11:31
until you you know that until you leave again, you don't have a camera on you
01:11:36
when you go to the bathroom. Um you don't have a camera on you when you go to bed at night, but a lot of the rest
01:11:41
of the time you're on public display all of the time. Everything that you do is
01:11:45
being watched and that takes a bit of getting used to. Yeah. Yeah. I can't imagine. I can't And and um what does an
01:11:53
average day look like as prime minister? What what time are you at the office? Every average day is very different to
01:11:58
the day before. So like when parliament's sitting a cabinet Monday is a reasonably sort of straightforward
01:12:05
day. So um you know you've got your pre meetings for with different things then
01:12:09
cabinet and then press conference and uh then normally I'd spend the evening
01:12:14
doing um preparation for the morning media around the next morning which would start at 6:00 a.m. Um and then uh
01:12:22
then you'd be in through uh cabinet committee meetings in the morning, parliamentary question time, more
01:12:27
meetings through the afternoon and evening. Uh similar on Wednesday, and then often after parl after question
01:12:33
time on Wednesday, you'd often be on a plane somewhere cuz on a um PMs don't
01:12:38
generally go to parliament on a Thursday. You basic because you just can't fit everything in. So th Wednesday
01:12:43
night, you'd often fly out to wherever you're going, have a day um out and
01:12:47
about on Thursday and potentially another day out and about on Friday. um weekends you try and sort of
01:12:53
pre-position to wherever you need to be for whatever the weekend functions are. Um and then you know I was trying to
01:12:59
sort of spend at least every second weekend with my kids and uh you know that that's
01:13:06
easier said than done. Yeah. Yeah. And how are you like when you've got time with the kids like how are you
01:13:12
able to um be fully engaged? Is that possible? It it is. Um, I mean I I've I've kind of adopted an approach in
01:13:19
politics which is I try not to involve my kids in anything to do with politics. I want them to be anonymous. So, you
01:13:25
know, most people won't know my my the names of my kids and wouldn't know them
01:13:28
if they tripped over them in the street cuz I never have photos of them because I just want them to be regular Kiwi kids
01:13:35
and and that's actually worked really well. My kids school has been amazing.
01:13:39
They treat them the same as every other kid. the other parents treat me the same
01:13:42
as every other parent and and I really really appreciate that. And so I just want my kids to have a normal childhood.
01:13:49
Um you know they for like a lot of kids they live between two homes because you know it's the way we live these days and
01:13:55
a lot of a lot of relationships don't work out. Um but I I kind of keep them
01:13:59
out of the spotlight but it means that when I do have time with them I try really hard to have unplugged time. So,
01:14:07
I'll put my phone in the bedroom and I'll be like, "Right, for the next hour,
01:14:10
this is your time." And we'll play a board game or we'll do something
01:14:14
together because if you're always like this when you're with the kids, they're
01:14:19
not going to get the best out of you. And so, I try You can't do that all day,
01:14:22
but I will try and have unplugged time with them. Yeah. Um, so your team asked me to submit some sort of um, yeah, line
01:14:31
of questioning for that. I explained it's just a very informal chat and there's no agenda, no clickbait, no
01:14:36
nothing like that. Um, but it was made very clear that you didn't want to talk
01:14:39
about, you know, your sort of family dynamic and stuff. Um, which which I I fully respect. I mean, especially you
01:14:44
see like your friend Justinda, the treatment that she got and Clark, I I think Clark is probably one of the worst
01:14:50
treated um, partners of a prime minister in recent history. There was just so so
01:14:55
many malicious rumors going around. Yeah. And and look, there's a there's a
01:14:59
lot of that that sits under, you know, underneath it and I try to ignore it. What about imposter syndrome? Are you
01:15:04
familiar with the term impost? Oh, totally. When when you became prime minister or even even in cabinet or
01:15:09
whatever is Oh, it absolutely happens. Like I remember when I first became a minister, um I moved into uh an office
01:15:16
in parliament called 6.3. That was uh Steven and it was Steve Mahari's old office um where I so I had
01:15:23
worked there as a staff member and I remember sitting in at my ministerial desk on those first few days sort of
01:15:28
fully expecting Steve to walk in and be like what the hell are you doing sitting
01:15:31
at my desk? You know, like it was kind of you have those moments where you kind of like, oh, so I'm the one doing this
01:15:37
now. And I um I went um and caught up with Grant at the end of the day and he was in what was Michael Cullen's old
01:15:44
office and he had exactly the same thing. you know, we were just sort of sitting there waiting for someone to
01:15:49
come in and tell us to get out. Um, I think everybody when they when they're
01:15:53
thrust into a really important job like that probably feels that way. What were the coolest things about the job? You
01:15:58
got to go to the coronation, eh? The King Charles coronation. Yeah, King Charles's coronation was pretty awesome.
01:16:02
Yeah. Um, going to China was that was phenomenal, you know. um going to the great hall of the people, meeting um you
01:16:12
know, President Xiinping, uh meeting King Charles. That that was that was a weird experience. You know, I got off
01:16:18
the plane in um London uh at Heathrow and went straight to Windsor Castle. I hadn't even had time to have a shave.
01:16:25
went straight to Windsor Castle and I was sitting down um meeting with Prince William and I mean he was lovely and he
01:16:32
knew that I just got off the plane so I think he probably gave me some latitude for being a little bit jet-lagged but
01:16:38
just that that whole visit was quite surreal really you know being at a an event like that I was in the in the
01:16:44
coronation itself I think I was sitting between um Justin Trudeau uh from Canada
01:16:49
and um and Elbow my my mate from Australia and sort of thinking this is just weird You know, this is a big day
01:16:56
for a boy from that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Do you have many of those moments where it's like like what the hell? How did I
01:17:02
end up here? Oh, absolutely. All the time. Um so, I'm just getting a slightly
01:17:06
croaky voice. Um yeah, I do. And but the thing is you then realize that they're just all
01:17:12
people as well. You know, I got on really well with Elbow um from over in Australia and we'd find ourselves just,
01:17:20
you know, at all these big international events. And I remember saying to him at
01:17:24
one point, I think we'd both arrived at something, you know, in some there's
01:17:27
been this sweeping motorcade and I just said, "I don't think I'll ever get used
01:17:31
to that." And he said to me, and I thought this is really great. He says, "Mate, the day we get used to this, we
01:17:37
should quit." And I thought, "That's absolutely right. You know, the day it
01:17:41
starts to feel normal is the day that you've been doing it too long." Yeah.
01:17:45
What was the one thing about being prime minister that you didn't expect or like
01:17:48
the biggest surprise? Is there anything that stands out? Uh, I mean, I I I don't
01:17:52
know if that you could say that they were big surprises. I think you just say that the scale of it was a bit more than
01:17:57
I thought. You know, that that public scrutiny, the fact that everywhere you went in public, someone was watching,
01:18:04
that was new. Um, and I kind of I knew that my life was going to go up a notch in terms of being in the public
01:18:10
limelight, but the the scale of that uh was just took quite a bit of adjusting to. Um the fact that even you know a
01:18:19
simple thing like going to the supermarket you kind of almost had to negotiate it. Um you know I had to I had
01:18:24
security out the front of the house. You know I couldn't just wander out the
01:18:26
front door. I needed to let them know okay we're going to supermarket half an
01:18:29
hour and they would need to prepare and everything. So that takes a bit of getting used to. They are the most
01:18:34
amazing people though. They bend over backwards just to do to accommodate you know to do whatever um I wanted to do
01:18:40
which was great. But it, you know, I also like to be courteous. You know, I think just getting in the car and
01:18:48
driving to the supermarket without telling them that's where you're going.
01:18:50
I just I I never would like to do that sort of thing. I don't think that's fair
01:18:54
on them. Then they've got a job to do. I I tried to make their job easy. Yeah. If
01:18:59
you could go back to the first day of the job as prime minister, what advice would you give yourself as someone
01:19:04
that's been there? uh it's very easy to be distracted as prime minister and because just it just
01:19:12
comes at you all day every day and I started with a pretty clear sense of what I thought our government needed to
01:19:18
change and I think we we did all right those first few months but events just take over so um and that that's
01:19:25
something that I you know again I think you have to get the balance right between dealing with day-to-day events
01:19:33
and still sticking to your course and I mean if I look at the current government
01:19:37
that's one thing Christopher Luxon is um uh he's kind of got his his quarterly
01:19:42
plans and stuff but I think he's he's he sticks to them too rigidly and doesn't
01:19:46
deal with the day-to-day probably I was the other end I was dealing with the dayto-day um and and perhaps not keeping
01:19:52
enough of a strategic overview on the direction of travel so getting that balance right I think one of the key
01:19:59
things to being a successful prime minister yeah just the other day I saw some clips of Luxon playing cricket on
01:20:05
the street in India with you Ross Taylor and some others. Um and I thought is that stuff annoying like you you in the
01:20:11
back of your mind you know you've got so many other jobs to do and you've got to
01:20:15
do this photo opportunity. No actually I give I'll give him credit for that. I
01:20:18
think that was a great thing for him to do and he's not a bad bowler is he? Yeah
01:20:22
those lighter moments I think are really important. Um being human when you're
01:20:26
the prime minister is really important. Um, but also every now and then, you know, just taking a moment to enjoy the
01:20:33
job. There's nothing wrong with that. You know, it's a hard job and there's
01:20:37
some fun aspects to it. And just taking a moment now and then to take a deep breath and enjoy it. I probably didn't
01:20:44
do that enough. There were a few moments there where um I'd find myself sitting
01:20:48
alone in my office on the ninth floor of the Beehive looking out over That's got
01:20:51
a great view, by the way. Fantastic view of the Wellington Harbor looking out over the Wellington Harbor. But they
01:20:56
were they were very few and far between. And I think having, you know, the odd moment just to look out at the viewer
01:21:03
and think this is pretty cool. Yeah. You've had um John Key on the podcast before and he said the same sort of
01:21:08
thing. Often he'd be the last person at at Parliament at the Beehive like writing letters or signing cards at 2 in
01:21:14
the morning or whatever. And it makes me wonder how does how does Trump have so much golf time. Yeah. Yeah. I look I
01:21:19
suspect he's not reading many of the briefing papers but um yeah if you're
01:21:24
doing it well it it's it is all consuming you know like you one of the things that happens is you know as prime
01:21:31
minister each day you get a a folder at the end of every night that kind of gives you advice on everything that's
01:21:36
going on within the government and if you can get away with not reading it in some cases. Um, but if you don't, you're
01:21:45
not really in the driver's seat anymore. And if you really want to be in control
01:21:50
of what's happening in your government, you have to have the discipline to read
01:21:53
that folder every night. And it's it's hard going cuz sometimes it'll be, you
01:21:58
know, 12:30 by the time you get home and you're sitting there thinking, there's
01:22:02
about an hour's worth of reading here and I just really want to go to bed. But
01:22:05
you have you have to do it. M I'm a slow reader and I struggle to retain information as well. Do is is
01:22:14
that like a like a learned sort of thing like you just become very very good at like skimm reading something and
01:22:19
retaining a lot of information. You definitely get you you get faster in your reading. It ruins you for
01:22:24
recreational reading. So um you know I pick up a novel and I kind of flick to the back to look for the
01:22:29
recommendations. But um it's it's um yeah you get used to that though. And
01:22:36
you and you also learn what you have to read and what's kind of optional. So all
01:22:40
of the briefings will have information that that's critical to the decision you're going to make and it'll have
01:22:44
other information and you learn there's a lot of repetition. So you'll learn uh
01:22:49
which bits you don't need to read. M and then your your term as prime minister
01:22:53
came to an end um with on the night of the 2023 election uh where you made like um a really emotional speech and you
01:23:00
showed a bit of vulnerability like I think it was about 9 minutes in where you said finally to my family for
01:23:04
everything you've done to me and your your voice started um cracking. Um are
01:23:08
you yeah are you a reasonably emotional person or not? Typically largely when it
01:23:12
comes to my family I get a little emotional and that was very hard you know um during the time I was prime
01:23:17
minister my parents did a huge amount of the raising of my kids on my behalf and
01:23:22
you can never say thank you enough for that. Um and it was hard on them. The campaign was very hard on them. Um so
01:23:30
yeah it was sort of an emotional moment. Um, I introduced the world to uh the fact that I had a new relationship with
01:23:38
Tony uh without clarifying uh anything about Tony. So that triggered a whole lot of uh rumors rather quickly as to as
01:23:45
to whether Tony was a man or a woman. Um and uh and so people got a little excited about that on Twitter. I
01:23:53
understand. That's you had to do a followup explaining it was Tony with an eye. That's right. Yeah. Um but that was
01:23:59
impromptu in the car on the way there because um you know I I was going through the sort of formal speech that
01:24:06
had written and and it just didn't feel right not to thank her. So she wasn't in
01:24:10
the original draft of the speech. I added that in and but it didn't feel right not to say thank you. You know she
01:24:16
she'd come with me to a lot of stuff and just in in many cases just been sitting
01:24:19
in the van to to remain anonymous. But that's that that emotional support through there. Particularly, you know,
01:24:25
the campaign got harder as it went along because you know, as much as you go into
01:24:30
every day thinking we can still win, you do get to the point where you know you're not doing very well and that gets
01:24:37
hard and that emotional support was hugely important. Yeah. How Yeah. How do you have time for
01:24:43
a relationship? Yeah. It was it was hard as prime minister and I was very lucky that Tony
01:24:48
was very accommodating of that. Did you when would you go for weeks without seeing each other? I think during that
01:24:54
period around um when I was away for the king's coronation and then I came home
01:24:59
came back and then I went to China and then I think there was a period about 6 weeks where we didn't see each other you
01:25:03
know that that was just the nature of what was of that. Um now that we actually have a relationship that's a
01:25:11
fully declared public relationship is a little bit easier because um Tony can come with me to some events and stuff
01:25:16
and so that that opens up some more possibilities. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of that election campaign, um there was one
01:25:22
of the debates with Jessica Mai and you you offered Christopher Luxon some advice if he became prime minister and
01:25:28
your answer was something like um you need to get better at um answering questions cuz you're not very good at
01:25:32
it. Yeah. And um it triggered a memory a couple of weeks ago when he was on ZB with Hosking and uh Have you seen that
01:25:38
clip online? Yeah, I have. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I I actually think one of the things I mean I'm not
01:25:45
going to give him too much advice. I don't want him to get better. But um but
01:25:48
one of the things that I think sometimes he just needs to say I don't know or I
01:25:54
don't I'm not in a position to answer that question at the moment. People by
01:25:58
and large again will respect you for saying that. I think it's when you try and bluster your way through that people
01:26:03
get a bit frustrated and it's hard, you know. Um I've always tried in politics
01:26:08
and and I've people have made fun of me for it because they're like, "Oh, Chris
01:26:12
Hipkins doesn't know anything." But I will say if I don't know something
01:26:17
and or if I get something wrong, I will say I made a mistake there. I don't think I make more mistakes than any
01:26:23
other politician, but I think I own them a bit more and I'm more willing to admit
01:26:27
them than others. And I I think again that's something that we underrate in politics.
01:26:34
Yeah, it's human, isn't it? Yeah, totally. Um are there any any um politicians that you absolutely loathe?
01:26:40
You don't have to give names or anything, but does you're all doing the same job and it's all very unique. Do
01:26:45
you all is there sort of a friendly respect or Well, many cases there there is. Um I think the the politicians I
01:26:53
struggle with and I struggle with them on both sides of the house to be fair are the people for whom politics becomes
01:27:01
the game in itself. They lose sight of why we're there. It basically everything's about the game of politics
01:27:09
and and I don't have any time or respect for that approach. There's a there's a
01:27:13
time for politics. There's a time for, you know, giving each other a bit of argy. There's a time for having a crack
01:27:19
at each other. But there's also a time for being human. Um I've had people on the other side of
01:27:26
the house and I won't I won't go through all of the names. I mean, I can mention
01:27:29
a few of them. Um Nikki Kay was one of them. um she's no longer with us, but we
01:27:34
would exchange messages of supportive messages towards each other from time to time even when we were disagreeing. So
01:27:43
if she had a really rough day and sometimes I would have been the cause of that, you know, as is the opposition uh
01:27:49
spokesperson to her, I'd still be able to say to her at the end of the day, rough day for you. Hope you're doing
01:27:54
okay. you know, I think that whereas there are other politicians who don't have that
01:28:00
mentality, you know, they're kind of um and I we're still all human. Do you think
01:28:07
that was part of you I've had Nikki Kay on the podcast as well a couple of years
01:28:10
ago. Um yeah, she's fabulous woman. It was devastating news. Um do you think
01:28:14
part of that uh was just sort of like you were the new wave of politicians coming through? So I suppose like 2008
01:28:20
there was yourself, Nikki, Justinda, Simon as well perhaps, Simon Bridges. Yeah. I mean, I get on really well with
01:28:25
Simon these days. Um, but then, you know, these days, but there were days there where you used to get under my
01:28:29
skin and really piss me off. Um, but we actually get on really well now. And again, it just shows you you got to
01:28:36
remember that people are human beings. Todd Mueller, um, uh, I got on really well with him on on select committee.
01:28:43
Um, when he stood down as leader of the National Party, I kept in touch with him
01:28:46
for a period. Um, and still do occasionally exchange messages with him. Um, you know, I really respected him for
01:28:56
being upfront about why he quit and that would have been really really hard to, you know, to say that you're quitting
01:29:02
for your mental health. Um, but I I just think, you know, I told him that at the
01:29:06
time. I was like, I really really respect what you have just done and and I hope that you people are looking at
01:29:13
looking after you and yeah, he had a lot of support from his family and stuff, but um yeah, he deserves a lot of credit
01:29:19
for that. That was a gutsy thing to do at a time when he would have been feeling very very vulnerable and um I
01:29:26
told him that. Yeah. And I think um yeah, Todd Muller, for anyone that doesn't remember, he was the leader of
01:29:30
the National Party for a very short period of like 70 days or something. Yeah. Um and then had some panic attacks
01:29:36
and anxiety. I feel like um uh your senior politicians that still you still are unable to show any sort of
01:29:43
vulnerability or weakness or you even admit your your mental health is not where it should be. Would that be a fair
01:29:49
thing to say? I think you do have to be incredibly internally resilient as a when you get into the sort of senior
01:29:55
levels of politics. Um, but you have to work on it. You can't take it for granted. So, you have to keep your your
01:30:02
mental and physical health in check. My physical health is not great, but um I don't know. You're doing park runs these
01:30:08
days. Exactly. You do 5ks every other weekend and that's actually really important for mental health. Um, so, you
01:30:14
know, I I I I work on that. Um, what you read is also important. So, um, I've,
01:30:19
um, I've been reading a series of books by a guy called Ryan Holidayiday, who
01:30:23
who writes the Daily Stoic Newsletter, and it loves the Romans. Yeah. Loves the Romans. But, but I actually just find
01:30:29
that again, it's it's it's helpful now and then to remember that nothing is new
01:30:34
under the sun. You know, uh, what we're going through are the same things that,
01:30:38
you know, um, Marcus Aurelius went through thousands of years ago. Um it's uh it it puts things in perspective.
01:30:47
Yeah. But stoicism, a lot of people think of that as just like, you know, putting on a stern face or wearing a
01:30:52
mask or whatever, but we're where if you read Ryan's stuff, it's actually not
01:30:56
that. Yeah. And and Stoics have emotions the same as everybody else. It's it's
01:30:59
learning to understand your own emotions, learning to understand what makes you tick. and and understanding
01:31:04
the kind of the stoic virtues which are around courage. They're around discipline. Um they're around, you know,
01:31:11
a good sense of justice. These things are and wisdom. These things are important and you do need to. So I I I
01:31:20
mean the thing I like about the way he writes his books is you can read a chapter before bedtime and it's
01:31:24
literally a five-minute read because the chapters are all quite short and they're
01:31:27
all very they're written in a way that's designed that you know you can they're
01:31:30
designed for you to read one a day. And so I do and allowing yourself that five minutes just to kind of gain a bit of a
01:31:38
sense of perspective at the end of every day is important. I think I've got the
01:31:41
same book. It's like 365 daily meditations or something something like that. Um yeah, how's your mental health
01:31:46
been? Has it been been mostly good over the years? Yeah, I mean I've had bad
01:31:50
moments um as you can imagine. Uh but uh by and large I've I've I've managed to
01:31:55
find ways of kind of keeping that in check. Um physical exercise and activity. Um diet's terrible but
01:32:04
physical exercise is really important. So even some nights, you know, 10:00 at night, I'll finally, you know, be
01:32:10
checking it almost winding down for the day and sometimes I'll get in the exercise cycle for half an hour, and it
01:32:15
just helps to burn away what's left of the day's frustrations. Yeah. Have you
01:32:19
ever um seen a therapist or anything? Uh when when I separated, I did um the I I think people shouldn't be afraid
01:32:28
to talk to to people. Um absolutely not. So I have done that on occasion. Um, one day I'll sit down with a
01:32:36
therapist and and talk through the whole period of co 19, but uh that might take
01:32:40
a while. Um, you know, there's a lot of repressed trauma there for everybody, I
01:32:44
think. Um, but yeah, no, I'd encourage people to do it. I think you you everyone can get something out of
01:32:51
talking to someone. Yeah, I put off going for years. I think I was just um I was nerv I don't know. I was nervous. I
01:32:58
didn't know where to start. And then you get in there and you realize they're the
01:33:00
professional and they leave the conversation. Um, but I can't I can't imagine it's easy going to see a
01:33:05
therapist when you're, you know, well known, like when you're the the prime
01:33:08
minister or, you know, the high up in the in the in the government. The thing you'll find about um about all these
01:33:15
things is you just got to pick the right people. You know, do my doctors have always been amazing. you know they uh
01:33:22
well they I mean I think it goes with their profession you know they they're
01:33:26
very discreet but you'll find the same anyone counselors anyone anyone who's offering
01:33:32
a professional service to you as a senior politician a high-profile public figure they go out of their way to kind
01:33:38
of respect your space and I I think that's something that a lot of people would underestimate the value of but if
01:33:46
you pick the right people they're really good. Yeah, thanks for admitting that.
01:33:50
Yeah, I mean there there shouldn't be any sort of like shame or stigma around
01:33:53
it, but I think there still is in certain circles. So, it's um it's big of
01:33:56
you to admit that. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I I have said to all of our MPs, you know, go even if you only do it once
01:34:03
and you decide you don't need it anymore, everyone should try it at least once, you know, go and talk to someone.
01:34:08
Um because politics is one of those those jobs where it's very easy to get stuck inside your own head and no one
01:34:16
should be ashamed of reaching out and getting a bit of help from time to time. Everyone will go through periods where
01:34:21
they need it. When was the last time you cried? Oh, watching movies. Um I really someone
01:34:28
what's your genre? I watched I watched that movie Tina um which is a new um New
01:34:34
Zealand uh made film about a a Pacific woman in Christ Church following the Christ Church earthquakes. And there was
01:34:41
a particularly powerful moment in there where I was like and I was at the official premiere and I was blubbering
01:34:45
away in the audience and I was thinking I hope no one sees me. Yeah, I I find um I don't I'm going to
01:34:52
call it um like manopause. I'm funny as I get older I get more and more emotional and they're generally happy
01:34:57
tears which it's a wonderful emotion. Um you I had Simon Bridges on the podcast a
01:35:02
couple of years ago and he said sometimes like on a Friday he had be taking the plane back to Toadong at the
01:35:07
end of a grueling week and had sometimes shut his eyes on the plane and you sort
01:35:11
of feel the tears welling up behind it. It's a tough job eh it's brutal. It is
01:35:15
and it's um it I actually and so a lot of MPs will say that about going home. I
01:35:21
find it going the other way is the hard part. Sometimes leaving home um is the hard bit, particularly if you haven't
01:35:27
been there very long. Uh you know, you come home, you you you just sort of reconnect and then you're off again.
01:35:33
That's hard. Yeah. Yeah. Cuz you don't get the time back, do you? So it's a decision. So once it's
01:35:40
gone, it's gone. Um what's one thing about you that most people wouldn't
01:35:43
know? Oh, goodness me. I don't I I don't know actually. I haven't thought
01:35:50
of that before because I try and be a bit of an open book. You know, I think it's one of the secrets to survival in
01:35:55
politics is to try and be pretty open. Um because if you're open then there's
01:36:01
less room for rumors and speculation. So, I don't know that there'd be much
01:36:04
about me that people don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Um what about through through your
01:36:10
um relationship breakdown? Uh, what do you think the biggest lessons you learned about yourself were? Lessons I
01:36:15
learned about myself? Oh goodness. Um, I think we we're all works in progress.
01:36:21
From the day we're born to the day we die, we're always a work in progress.
01:36:24
And you always have to reflect, you know, as as with anything when when a relationship ends like that. You have
01:36:30
to there's there's always two sides to that and you always have to reflect on
01:36:35
what could what what did I do? You know, what could I have done differently? Um,
01:36:39
so I learned a lot from a lot about myself from just that kind of internal naval gazing um about what being a good
01:36:47
partner looks like. And I I wasn't always a good partner. Well, hard with the job as well. Not that I'm giving you
01:36:52
a completely free pass, but um yeah, it is it is hard. It's a very important job
01:36:56
and there's a lot of like pressure and expectation. It's funny the thing you
01:36:59
said there. That's one thing that I got from therapy as well. Like the therapist
01:37:02
said in any situation just ask you know what was my role in all this? Um and it's a great way to go into any sort of
01:37:09
situation I find. Yeah, absolutely. And you know always, you know, we are all works in progress. No one's born
01:37:15
perfect. No one has all the answers. We've always got to keep working on ourselves. What's the No one gets to um
01:37:22
50 years of age without going through some sort of big adversity. What What is it for you professionally and
01:37:25
personally? Uh losing is never fun. Um and right, you know, becoming prime minister and losing an election was
01:37:33
pretty hard. Mh. Um, having said that, if if I go through life and that's the
01:37:36
most adverse circumstance I ever face, I'm pretty bloody lucky. Um, you know,
01:37:41
outside of work, relationship, breakups, that's that's not been great. Um, but,
01:37:48
uh, I have to say, you know, I I feel like I have been I've had a very lucky
01:37:52
life, and I feel incredibly um an incredible amount of gratitude for that. What are your best and worst habits?
01:37:59
Uh, I can be a bit uh nitpicky sometimes. I I describe I describe myself as a um uh now what was
01:38:11
the I I I came up with a phrase the other day um to to describe it. So, I'm very organized in my disorganization or
01:38:18
I'm very I'm very organized in my level of distraction. So, what I'll do is I'll
01:38:22
make lists of things to do and then typically pick off the least important things to do first and not get to the to
01:38:27
the stuff that I actually really need to do. Um, so I can be a bit kind of like that really. Um, prone to
01:38:34
procrastination. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, yeah, I I we all have bad habits. I can um Yeah, I can procrastinate with the
01:38:44
best of them. Um, and the nitpicky thing you reminded me Hosking said a thing about you about a week ago. He described
01:38:50
you as like a little dog that barks at every car that goes past. I feel that's
01:38:54
just been leader of the opposition by nature. And and I've actually tried really hard not to do that. So on areas
01:38:59
where we agree with the government, I've actually tried to say that. But what you
01:39:02
find is, you know, in the in the modern media, if I stand up and say, "Oh, by
01:39:06
and large I agree with the government on that, there'll be no mention of me whatsoever in in any coverage of that
01:39:12
particular issue." They'll only I only get coverage when I'm disagreeing with
01:39:15
them. And so as a result, the public think, oh, all you ever do is disagree. Well, it's not actually we're agreeing
01:39:21
with a lot of the things that they're doing. Well, no, actually not that many,
01:39:24
but there are occasions where we'll agree with some of the stuff that they're doing. It's just no one no one
01:39:28
mentions it. No one covers that. Once a government gets um elected, how how long
01:39:34
do you think they can dine out on the other party's mistakes? Everyone's
01:39:37
guilty of that across the spectrum. Everyone's guilty of that, but I think this government have done it more
01:39:42
forcefully than any other governments before. um and and unfairly in my view. Um I
01:39:47
think the public tolerance of it, governments will continue to do that forever, but public tolerance of it
01:39:53
starts to wayne. And I think this government have kind of used up a lot of the the goodwill that they might have
01:39:58
had for the public in that regard. So I think already people are kind of like, oh, you guys have been there for a year
01:40:02
and a half now. Come on. Yeah. Is there a what if that keeps you up at night? Lots of them. you know, what if there's
01:40:11
so many things that can happen in the world right at the moment. Um, you know, a big one, what if there is another
01:40:17
major global military conflict around the world? We can't discount the possibility of that happening. What if
01:40:23
there's a major natural disaster? I live in Wellington. I literally live right
01:40:26
above the fault line. Um, that that's that's going to happen at some point in
01:40:31
Oakland. What if there's a volcanic eruption? You know, all of these things are whatifs. But I think you can you can
01:40:39
spend your life thinking about that or you can deal with things as they come along and have the right attitude
01:40:45
towards them and get on with living life. Um I remember looking after the Canterbury earthquakes. I remember
01:40:53
walking down Lam K at lunchtime and thinking of all of the people jammed onto Lam K at lunchtime with all those
01:40:59
awnings above them and thinking if if that if Canterbury happened here now all these people what what would happen? But
01:41:07
then I also thought you can't stop living your life on that basis. You know, you still got to you still got to
01:41:12
get out of bed every day and go to work and you still got to live life and if it
01:41:17
happens it happens. Yeah. this I mean the sun's going to rise every day whether you're up for it
01:41:22
or not, isn't there? Yeah. Is there a mistake you wish you could go back and
01:41:25
correct? Uh oh. Look, there's plenty of plenty there particularly um that last sort of
01:41:33
around July, June, July, that period that I was prime minister. A lot of things went bad uh for us around
01:41:38
personnel issues. I'd go back and handle some of those quite differently if I
01:41:41
could do them again. Um, life life's life's full of things that you do differently. I I think
01:41:51
that's different to a sense of regret. You know, you you've got to learn from
01:41:56
what you've done, but if you spend all your time regret regretting things, you
01:42:00
don't move forward. So, I think I don't spend a lot of time on regret because lessons, yes, regret, no.
01:42:10
Where do you see yourself? um like in 10 years time, 15 years time, what's next?
01:42:15
What's after politics? Uh I mean, I'd like to have another go at being prime
01:42:18
minister. I've still got a lot of things that I'd like to do. Um and I'd like to
01:42:22
have a good decent run at that. I mean, 6 months, I mean, it's effectively 6
01:42:26
months if you take out the election campaign. Six months isn't much time to do anything really in that job. Um I'd
01:42:31
like to have a good crack at that. Uh beyond politics, I don't know. Haven't
01:42:36
really thought that far ahead. I've never thought that far ahead, you know, like I I believe you throw yourself into
01:42:40
what you're doing at the time and um and as long as you're still enjoying it, um
01:42:46
then you keep going. But I did make a promise to myself uh when I got into politics that if I ever found myself
01:42:53
thinking I'm still doing this because I don't know what else I could do, I would
01:42:57
quit and force myself to find something else to do. Cuz I I've seen me members
01:43:01
of parliament who seem to still be there because they just don't know what else
01:43:04
where else to go. And I never want to be one of those. Um the minute the minute the passion disappears, I'm just going
01:43:12
to I'll force myself to find something else. C can you still lead Labor at the
01:43:16
next election? Because it feels like um at land politics, there's a cynical sort
01:43:20
of thing where if you if if you lose an election um they might keep you there until near the next one and then someone
01:43:26
will roll you. No, like that happen or does that all depend on polls and things? No, I've I've absolutely got the
01:43:31
support of the team to lead the party into the next election and uh plenty of people have have made comebacks. Yeah.
01:43:38
Um Keith Holio, former New Zealand prime minister, lost the election, became prime minister at the last minute, lost
01:43:45
the election three years later was elected and then he was prime minister for 12 years across the Tasman. John
01:43:51
Howard lost an election uh and then sometime later came back and it ended up being a very long-erving Australian
01:43:57
prime minister. Oh, Trump. Most recently. Most recently, Donald Trump made a comeback after one term out. You
01:44:03
know, nobody saw that. We live in a volatile political environment these days. Yeah. Um, three words that um
01:44:10
family or friends would use to describe you. Uh, Tony or your parents perhaps? Uh, patient,
01:44:20
stubborn, and hopefully caring. Well, they're good words. Yeah. Yeah. And are you proud of yourself? Yeah,
01:44:28
absolutely. Absolutely. You know, all human beings, as I said, are a work in progress, but you have to you have to be
01:44:35
open to to improvement, but you should also be proud of the things that you've
01:44:39
managed to achieve. It's hard for a lot of New Zealanders to to say that. It
01:44:43
feels kind of like showy or something. Yeah. And I I do think there's the whole
01:44:47
Kiwi Tool Poppy thing that we just need to get over. It's okay to be proud of
01:44:51
yourself. It's okay to be to reflect on things and say, "I I I'm I'm proud of
01:44:56
that accomplishment as long as it doesn't doesn't become a sense of arrogance. You've still got to be open
01:45:00
to improvement." Hey, this has been really enjoyable today. Awesome. How's it been for you?
01:45:05
Yeah, it's been great. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I get the feeling you're more
01:45:08
comfortable talking about the political stuff than stuff centered around yourself as a person. Well, it was
01:45:13
probably because I'm a political animal and that's where I spend most of my life
01:45:16
um is working in politics. But but also I mean I do try and kind of keep a bit of a distinction there. So and I don't
01:45:23
talk about the family stuff much because um I you know I want my family outside of politics to be able to stay out of
01:45:31
it. And I suppose also you've seen um painfully close just how brutal um the
01:45:36
media and the public on social media can be to those people that you care about the most. Well, I remember I think Phil
01:45:41
Goff uh said to me when we first when I first started in politics, he said, "If
01:45:46
you put your family into the public limelight when it's convenient, you can't take them out of the spotlight
01:45:51
when it's not convenient." And I've always remembered that because if you use your family as a political
01:45:59
prop, if something goes wrong and the media are asking you questions about that, you can't then just revert to
01:46:04
privacy because you have chosen that path. If you keep your family out of it, then the path of to, you know, that that
01:46:11
that sort of thing of respecting people's privacy, I think, is a much stronger case.
01:46:17
Thanks so much for your time today. It's been really good to connect and I really
01:46:20
appreciate it. It's been great. Yeah, I've enjoyed it.