Chris Hipkins has admitted he doesn’t have a photographic memory for facts and figures while Christopher Luxon has done a few mock debates with someone posing as his rival ahead of tonight’s 1News party leaders’ debate.<\/p>\n
Speaking to media earlier today Hipkins said he was hoping to sway some undecided voters.<\/p>\n
“I’m looking forward to the debate, I’m hoping that people will focus on the subtance of the debate rather than the sport of it.<\/p>\n
“I know there’s a big undecided vote out there at the moment so there’ll be people tuning in tonight to make up their minds.”<\/p>\n
After opening Auckland University’s refurbished Faculty of Education and Social Work’s building that has been redeveloped through the government’s Covid-19 Infrastructure Recovery Fund this morning, Hipkins was planning on spending the rest of the day doing his homework.<\/p>\n
“One weakness, and I’ll confess it now, I don’t have a photographic memory when it comes to facts and figures. I have been caught out on this before, so I will spend a bit of time trying to refresh my memory on those things, but I again hope that we will focus on the substance rather than the gotcha moments which these debates can sometimes come down to.”<\/p>\n
He highlighted climate change, child poverty and cost of living as topics likely to come up.<\/p>\n
Luxon who was feeling “pretty relaxed” says his party knows what’s important to New Zealanders and it’s “all about the cost of living”.<\/p>\n
“It’ll be a fun part of it [the campaign], but as I said last week, no disrespect, this country doesn’t need a great debater, what they need is a great manager.”<\/p>\n
Again today he has talked up Hipkins’ 20-year experience as a debater in Parliament and says he will be doing his best to present his case to the New Zealand people.<\/p>\n
Luxon says he has done a few mock debate sessions with someone posing as Hipkins, which he enjoyed.<\/p>\n
“We’ve done that a couple of times, yeah … different people, different times.”<\/p>\n
Follow the latest updates with RNZ’s liveblog:<\/b><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
VIA RNZ<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Chris Hipkins has admitted he doesn’t have a photographic memory for facts and figures while Christopher Luxon has done a few mock debates with someone posing as his rival ahead of tonight’s 1News party leaders’ debate. Speaking to media earlier today Hipkins said he was hoping to sway some undecided voters. “I’m looking forward to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":7908,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[222,174,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-news","category-nz-news","category-politics"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7907"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7907\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7909,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7907\/revisions\/7909"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7908"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}