Chris Hipkins: Prime Minister draws ire of Greens with latest policy bonfire, accused of kicking climate action can down the road

Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has burned several more schemes on his policy bonfire and splashed more cash in a welfare boost as his popularity continues to increase in the latest poll.

However, Hipkins’ second big policy reprioritisation, particularly in the transport sector, has ruffled the feathers of their political ally the Green Party, which claims it will only make the country’s future climate targets harder to achieve.

Several policies have either been cut, refocused or delayed to help free up the capital for the Government’s aim to reduce the cost of living, and Hipkins isn’t ruling out more former priorities being torched.

Hipkins told Newstalk ZB’s Mike Hosking today that he was not trying to buy the election.

“It is not at all what I have said.”

As a Government, cost of living and recovering from the recent floods and cyclone was the top priority.

Inflation had risen globally and New Zealand was not immune to this, Hipkins said.

“I am not accepting Government spending is the primary driver of inflation.”

However he conceded tax cuts and other decisions by the Government could have an impact on it.

Hipkins said he did not want people on low income and superannuation “to go backwards” with the cost of living increase.

“Government had to do something to bring inflation down. Interest rates will start to have an effect now.”

A recent forecast from most bank economists showed inflation starting to come down from next year, Hipkins said.

“Inflation is starting to trend down internationally.”

Asked about retail crime, Hipkins said there needed to be more work to be done to combat it.

He said the area of retail crime which had seen an increase was for shoplifting of amounts valued at under $500.

“There has been a much higher level of reporting since 2017.”

The fact that those businesses had reported more crime, gives police more tools to tackle it.

“There was good progress made last year to tackle more serious retail offending such as aggravated robbery and ram raids.

“We saw a spike last year. We made good progress, ram raiders were identified as repeat offenders, and we got them out of circulation. About 500 of those young people have been prosecuted.”

Hipkins said Cabinet would receive more information on Three Waters in the next few weeks.

Clean car scheme among several dumped policies

Yesterday Hipkins tossed the $568 million clean car upgrade scheme that allowed people to scrap old cars to gain a grant for a more environmentally friendly vehicle, staggered the rollout of Auckland light rail, narrowed the speed reduction programme, stopped the social leasing car scheme and refocused public transport goals in Auckland, Hamilton, Tauranga, Wellington and Christchurch.

Hipkins said today that the removal of a couple of policies the Government had previously been investigating - including the old vehicle scrappage scheme and the social leasing scheme - was due to the fact that they would have made a very small contribution to our overall emissions budgets.

There were other things the Government was doing that were proving to be more successful and had the potential to reduce the emissions by a much greater amount.

”This is about looking across the work programme and saying: ‘Okay, what’s actually going to deliver the sort of change that we need? What’s actually going to help New Zealanders with the cost of living?’ And making sure that we’re investing in and focusing in those things,” he told TVNZ.

Asked if investing in those now old policies had been a waste of time, Hipkins said looking at the vehicle scrappage scheme and the social leasing scheme, the advice that he had received that both were going to prove to be “quite difficult” to implement in the time frame concerned.

Between both of them, they were looking at something like 7000 tonnes of emissions reduction period.

Contrasting that with the clean car upgrade scheme and the industrial carbonisation programmes, they are talking about millions of tonnes of carbon reduced within a similar time period for a lesser cost, Hipkins said.

Hipkins rises in latest political poll

Yesterday’s bonfire came as the latest 1 News-Kantar poll on Monday led to Hipkins rising four percentage points to 27 per cent as the preferred PM, while National’s Christopher Luxon dropped five points to 17 per cent - his lowest since taking on the role at the end of 2021.

Labour dropped two points to 36 per cent while National fell three points to 34 per cent. The Greens and Act were both on 11 per cent, however, only the Left could form a government on those numbers - provided they were support