Why are progressives reluctant to criticise Chris Hipkins amid his ex-wife’s claims?
New Zealanders have an unusually enmeshed relationship with our politicians. Unlike in the US, where Congresspeople and Senators are distant as satellites, you can actually have a beer with New Zealand MPs outside of a photo op. Under MMP, casting a vote for the Greens or Te Pāti Māori at least vaguely feels like choosing your representative, rather than a slightly lesser enemy. Various outright leftists have done stints in Parliament and then returned (or will return) to the movement–Sue Bradford, Catherine Delahunty, Teanau Tuiono, Elizabeth Kerekere, Ricardo Menéndez-March, Ibrahim Omer. Even radical leftists find it hard to conceive of all politicians as our opponents when some are literally our personal friends.
As such, New Zealand progressives struggle to break free of attachments to centre-left political parties as vehicles for progressive change. It’s not that we necessarily like them, but that we regard them as a force we need to keep track of and work alongside. Radical leftist groups openly disavow the State, but most still set some of their clock by election year and query in meetings whether to help people enrol to vote. Most unions still maintain institutional ties to the Labour Party, despite its continual status as the Party of Rogernomics.
Despite MMP, New Zealand still treats politics like a two-horse race, meaning that any criticism of Labour—even from the Left—is taken as somehow helping National. Any threat to Labour from the Right thus makes progressives feel they need to drearily back Labour up, despite how much we otherwise hate them, while loyalty to the Greens and Te Pāti Māori is even stronger. This tendency is creating some stupid allegiances.
When Hipkins was accused of bad behaviour by his ex-wife, my first response to his teary face on the news was lol, I hate that guy–the same thing I always feel. It’s maddening to watch people stubbornly forget that Labour’s unprecedented majority win involved folding against Covid, faffing around with the most timid reforms possible, and handing power to the most unpopular National-led government in decades. Labour’s 2026 strategy appears to be waiting out everyone’s hatred of the Coalition Government and being handed the votes it feels it deserves. Go girl, give us nothing!
It’s fair to be uninterested in Hipkins’ relationship with his ex-wife; having takes on every abuse allegation is Tumblr brain, not functioning feminism. But it’s curious that reporting from the centre-left mostly skirts the substance of the allegations to focus on what will Hipkins do next or boy, the rumour mill sure is turning. Leaving aside the ever-present fear of legal ramifications, if you’re going to wade in, why not assess whether Hipkins truly did hurt his ex-wife?
What we’re seeing instead is progressives leading with how the claims are unsubstantiated, stressing that Hipkins hasn’t been accused of illegality, saying it’s a somewhat unfair fight because Hipkins can’t publicly retaliate (never mind personal or legal actions available to him privately), or declaring that we simply can’t decide without more evidence. (What sort of evidence would they like; personal emails, hospital records, voicemails of her crying?) Some of this is just bog-standard leftist sexism, but it’s worth unpacking how to evaluate claims like Paul’s, which parallel so many stories of miserable intimacy with men. How do we tell if it’s true that Hipkins left her at the hospital after a miscarriage, or didn’t support her and the kids when she was broke, as she claimed?
The answer is that we can’t. When assessing any case of intimate violence, there is almost no way to concretely distinguish between the rumour mill and facts. Abuse is a pattern whose whole is unseen by almost anyone except the victim. As such, virtually every individual event in the pattern can be taken out of context to paint a victim as the abuser, or vice versa. Sexual and physical abuse doesn't necessarily leave physical evidence that a bystander can easily see. If I say my abuser said these horrible things to me, I don’t have proof of its existence or effects beyond “trust me, it really hurt”. But all is not lost: as it turns out, accusations like she’s a lying bitch are also just unsubstantiated gossip and hearsay.
Believing an accuser or the accused is, therefore, almost always just an educated guess. Sometimes your guesses will be completely right, and sometimes wrong, but the nature of intimacy means you can rarely move much beyond guesswork. I would be unsurprised if the head of a major political Party had some skeletons in his closet, not precisely because of my opinions of Hipkins, but because intimate abuse and neglect by men in power is as banal as the weather. It’s more surprising when political callousness doesn’t mirror itself in someone’s personal life.
When progressive media figures weighed in to pointedly refrain from condemning Hipkins, it wasn’t necessarily because they politically support him, that they don’t care about women or intimate abuse, or from worries about being sued. It’s because people still can’t shake the urge to stick up for centre-left parties against the Right. The amplification of Paul’s allegations is obviously a right-wing media beat-up, but, well, so what? Let the girls fight! The belief that right-wing smears against Hipkins will trickle down to the Left gets the order wrong; we’re smeared by the Right regardless of what we do, and it occasionally trickles up towards centrists. No need, therefore, to defend a politician who would never defend us.
The reason I cringe when leftists cape for the Greens or talk about getting out the vote isn’t a kneejerk reaction against politicians. It’s because the Left should be doing such vibrant and challenging actions against the State that voting for better rulers becomes completely irrelevant. If we had a higher functioning activist scene, these people would be making appeals to us, not the other way around.
There are two main ways to neutralise leftist power: repression and recuperation. The latter is when energy to tear down a system gets redirected into specific institutions, thus diluting its potential challenges against it. We see recuperation when leftist theory gets channelled into academic papers and theses, unions become hierarchical and exploitative workplaces, community organising runs on NGO grants, or when leftists looking for jobs in Wellington get drawn into the machinations of centre-left political parties.
What’s stopping activists from abandoning these avenues of recuperation? It’s partly that New Zealand exceptionalism–our cops aren’t like the US, our racism isn’t as bad as Australia–trickles down to progressives and dampens our analysis of State power. Some hesitancy also comes from Kiwi politeness; it’s always scary to go up against power, but our cultural timidity makes us bad at even regular confrontation—especially when Aotearoa is so small and geographically isolated. Activists who boss around their comrades make it still harder to try anything outside the box. When I think about doing interesting activism, my deepest fears are reserved for the State, but my most immediate fears are that my alleged comrades would panic, disapprove and sell me out. In doing this, they unintentionally act as the State’s first line of defence.
Letting go of our dependency on outsourced power is hard; to truly accept that we’re the only ones coming to save us, and to take direct actions without asking permission that the mainstream Left will never grant us. But at least we can then look at whatever functionaries like Hipkins are up to and simply say lol, lmao even. Labour’s scandals are not capable of damaging or betraying the Left from the inside, because it hasn’t been part of the Left since 1984 at the latest. The Greens and Te Pāti Māori might be capable, but only if we keep treating them as an avenue of power rather than largely impotent recuperation. The colonial government remains boring and irrelevant to our struggles, no matter which political parties hang out there.
Anne Campbell is a writer and activist