Richard Hipa
niuean politician
Richard Starkie Hipa (19 January 1957 – 20 January 2025) was a Niuean politician who was a member of the Niue Assembly, and was first elected at the 2020 elections. While he initially planned to run in the constituency of Alofi north, he ultimately ran as a candidate on the common roll. Hipa received 440 votes in the election, which gave him the most votes in the election. This led to speculation that he would put his name forward as a contender for Premier, something Hipa confirmed, but ultimately he did not put his name forward and the election was contested between Dalton Tagelagi and O'Love Jacobsen.
Prior to his election, Hipa held the role of Secretary of Government, the senior civil servant role on the island. He left the role early and it ended in court action taken by the government against him. The case was eventually settled out of court.
In August 2021 he was medevaced to Auckland, New Zealand, in a critical condition.
Hipa retired due to ill-health at the 2023 election. He died in Auckland on 20 January 2025, at the age of 67.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Richard Hipa” as niuean politician. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as niuean politician. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 9, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q97446113. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1957, 2025, 2020 and 2021.
Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Richard Hipa” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.