Summarised by Centrist
Chris Hipkins is under pressure as the second COVID inquiry reopens public scrutiny of his role during the pandemic.
Writing for The Platform, Graham Adams argues that the media wrongly promoted Hipkins as a fresh start in 2023, when in fact he had been “Jacinda Ardern’s faithful lieutenant and confidant for five years in government.”
Adams says the public was misled by an image makeover: “After he turned up to a media interview in Napier… wearing wraparound sunglasses, cap and hoodie, they presented him as a working-class lad from the hard-scrabble Hutt Valley… In reality, he had been raised in a thoroughly middle-class family.”
The inquiry is now forcing him to confront his COVID record. Hipkins has agreed to written questions only, but Adams says that “makes him look as if he has something to hide.”
Adams notes Hipkins’ past attempts to rewrite the record: “He acknowledged that although the Covid period was ‘a challenging time for people they ultimately made their own choices’… Clearly untroubled by stretching the truth to breaking point, he reiterated: ‘There was no compulsory vaccination. People made their own choices.’”
That line, Adams says, will not wash. “Rather than demonising those who didn’t want to be injected… they could have been classed from the beginning as conscientious objectors.” Instead, dissenters were treated as “a caste of untouchables.”
