Labour's internal polling has the party above 30%, compared with the latest Taxpayers' Union Curia poll which has the party at 25.9%, Chris Hipkins says.

It comes as the Labour leader hints at a climate change policy to be announced later on Tuesday.

Hipkins brushed off the latest TPU-Curia poll result released on Monday, saying the only poll that matters is the election result.

That's despite dismissing last month's result, which had slightly higher support for Labour, as "rogue".

Speaking to Morning Report on Tuesday, Hipkins said it was "the National Party's poll, and it is lower than we want to be".

He stopped short of calling the poll unreliable, saying all polls were a valid sample of the people who they poll, "but the reality is there's there's a whole variety of different poll results out there at the moment".

Hipkins also referred to the previous RNZ Reid-Research poll, which had Labour on 32.2%.

"Your own polling indicated a significantly different result to the one that you're questioning me about now [TPU-Curia], which of course is the National Party's poll."

Asked multiple times what Labour's internal polling, done by Talbot Mills, had the party on, Hipkins refused to say - before claiming it was above 30%.

"It is significantly better than what the National Party's polls are saying."

It was put to Hipkins that the trend in all polls was downwards, and the Labour leader responded that "our goal is to obviously turn that trend back around".

Asked about self-reflection on his own performance, and whether he'd been "phoning it in" and should have been trying harder, Hipkins said "we live in an age of anger".

"I'm not going to be an angry politician yelling at everybody and making them angry. I am optimistic about the future of New Zealand.

"We can provide New Zealanders with more opportunity. I'm not going to settle for a country in which your opportunities depend on how much money your parents have. I think we're a better country than that, and that is exactly what I'm going to be campaigning on."

Asked where he'd been - if not campaigning - for the earlier part of the political term, Hipkins said Labour had been holding the government accountable for its "misdeeds".

"That is the job of the opposition. When you get into the campaign, though, you get to talk more about what you're going to do, and we are doing that."

He also said Labour would be pushing back on the National Party during the campaign, "who are out there telling absolute lies about the Labour Party".

"They've got billboards up all over the country around tax that are just absolutely untruthful. There's nothing factual. There's nothing truthful about them."

National has been on the attack recently with billboards and social media ads claiming the opposition would "triple your taxes", with Labour's capital gains tax as well as multiple policies from other left-leaning parties that Hipkins has ruled out.

He described Labour setting out plans for fixing "the crisis in our health system" and around solar power, as well as foreshadowing an announcement on climate change later on Tuesday.

The Labour leader was also questioned about his policies and their costs, specifically the plan not to increase the fuel excise duty at all for an entire term if elected.

Hipkins said with the exception of that policy, every policy Labour had announced had come with an explanation of how it would be paid for.

Transport Minister Chris Bishop has said Labour's policy on the fuel excise tax freeze would create a $4.6 billion shortfall.

Hipkins said Bishop was "absolutely wrong" because he hadn't included the government's own announcement "that they're doing half of what we have said".

"So they're going to freeze fuel taxes for the next 18 months, and they're putting extra money in to cover the cost of that.

"I'm saying that we would extend it for for the rest of the parliamentary term, beyond that, which by the way is hardly radical because it's what they've done this parliamentary term."

Asked multiple times for Labour's figure on how much it would cost, Hipkins refused to say.

Hipkins said he would release the costings once the government opens the books for the pre-election fiscal update (Prefu).

But it was put to him the Prefu outlined how much money there was to spend, rather than how much a party's policies cost, "that's for you to know, you don't have to wait for the Prefu", Morning Report host John Campbell said.

In response, Hipkins said: "One of the challenges around land transport is that we also need to know what the government have committed to spending, and at the moment they're not releasing that information either."

Curia is a long-running and established pollster in New Zealand. In 2024 it resigned its membership from the Research Association New Zealand (RANZ) industry body.