Visible in the near distance is the University of Otago campus, where Mr Hipkins had just endured the sort of vociferous student protest which he himself had once organised when he was a student’s association president.
The Prime Minister left his audience frustrated that he would not open his cheque book then and there to solve the financial woes which have beset the institution, saying universities were autonomous and that the government should not interfere with how they ran themselves.
Personally, however, Mr Hipkins seemed to rather enjoy being grilled on the topic.
"There is an undertone in all of that of ‘are our universities still places of free debate, are they becoming too consumer-focused?’," he said.
"Actually, the public meeting we just had is evidence that they are not, that students are still encouraged to think critically and to ask difficult questions. Ultimately that’s a good thing, isn’t it?"
Right next door to the ODT is the site of the troubled new Dunedin Hospital project, a much-anticipated and much-needed regional heath infrastructure development project which is enduring similar birth pains to many of the government’s other much-touted infrastructure endeavours.
"The planning stage is always the most frustrating in all of these projects and the hospital is a good example of that," Mr Hipkins said.
"When it starts to happen people will feel really good about it, but getting it to that point, that’s always the most frustrating part ... but it’s a big project and it’s going to take a long time.
"Getting the design work right is really important, knowing what you are building and why you are building it. Dunedin will ... I think, end up with one of the best hospitals in the country so making sure we get that right is important."
Which is a reasonable point, but the "getting it right" process has involved lengthy and costly delays, as well as extensive redesigns which have come at a price both in terms of dollars and in undermining public confidence in the project — the ODT’s "Our Health is Priceless" and the Dunedin City Council’s "They Save, We Pay" campaigns are tangible evidence of that.
"It is going to be 25% bigger than what you have got now and I know [Health Minister Ayesha] Dr Verrall was down here just recently hopefully putting to bed some of the remaining concerns about whether we were doing enough," he said.
"I’m pretty optimistic now that the design has been done, at some point you have to draw a line in the sand and say we have agreed what we are going to build and now we need to get on with it."
People are always impatient, but Mr Hipkins said the government was listening. For example, last week it released the first set of decisions about land and building classification post the recent severe weather events.
While it has not come with good news for all, and for some decisions still cannot be made, it was at least a faster process than the almost 10 months it took to make the same assessments following the September Canterbury quake.
"It [Cyclone Gabrielle] is across a broader geographic area, the extent of damage is quite different in different areas and the way of dealing with it is going to be quite different," Mr Hipkins said.
The recent Budget included a new resilience fund to safeguard vital infrastructure. While the details are yet to be fully developed, and while the bulk of the initial spend — as you would expect — will go on areas recently devastated by flooding — people in the South are keenly interested in how the fund will work.
Quite apart from the potential of large parts of Otago and Southland to be cut off from the rest of New Zealand by weather or seismic events, State Highway One and the adjacent main trunk line are slender but critical conduits for essential supplies.
"We have to do a variety of things, but we are never going to be able to, even in a 10-year period, remove every potential liability from our infrastructure network," Mr Hipkins said.
"That means we need to do a range of things. One, to look at the most urgent and pressing needs and make sure that we are prioritising those — for example, addressing the situation in a town where all the infrastructure runs along a bridge that is 80 years old.
"Longer term we need to think about how to build resilient infrastructure that is going to withstand natural disasters, but we also have to learn from this experience about how we can continue to streamline and smooth the response phase."
It is six months since Mr Hipkin’s sudden elevation to the top job. While he has worked in politics much of his professional life and was an experienced minister, the top job has proven to be a little different Mr Hipkins said.
"One of the surprising things is just how different the job is to being a minister," he said
"You think that when you become Prime Minister that it will be like being a minister but with more responsibility and with more stuff but it’s actually quite a fundamentally different job.
"Most of the day-to-day stuff is handled by portfolio ministers so you don’t have those areas where you are enmeshed or engaged at a deep level in an issue, you are much more thinly spread across a broad range of issues. That is quite different."
The resilience fund was one of the first new initiatives Mr Hipkins has been able to announce, following the much publicised slowing-down or cancellation of a range of programmes undertaken when Jacinda Ardern was Prime Minister.
That signals that his new administration is coming to the end of what he calls phase one: tidying off the work programme that was already in place, finishing what had already been started and "rationalising" where needed.
"The next part will be putting Labour in a position to campaign strongly during the election and that will include more about the future, more about what are we going to do next, rather than what are we going to slow down or what aren’t we going to do," Mr Hipkins said.
"The third part is to get re-elected and then to actually do that."
