Between now and the end of next month Labour's going to be battered and bloodied while it makes up its mind on how much it's prepared to compromise to get Peters across the line.
Back in the parliamentary bear pit after the recess, Bridges was ranting about KiwiSaver and how taxing capital gains was going to hurt the long-suffering savers. That failed to fire with Ardern, who hit back with a juggling of the figures that weakened his argument.
Undaunted, the birthday boy hammered away about Ardern's lack of business experience even though she claimed to have some in her interview on Mike Hosking's Newstalk ZB show last week. She'd worked for small businesses and had run an NGO, she then claimed, which had Bridges lining up for the king hit: What was the non-governmental organisation she was laying claim to?
Clearly it was one Ardern didn't want to be reminded of and, doing what she's become good at, she avoided the question but waffled about working in small businesses.
It was meant to be the prosecutor's killer blow: Was the NGO the International Union of Socialist Youth, which Ardern was once the president of, he asked?
She congratulated Bridges on his ability to read Wikipedia. If he had he would have realised being the president and running the organisation's a very different thing. It's actually run by the director-general who presides over a secretariat.
It was left to Act's leader David Seymour, fresh from his caucus meeting of one, to inflict the damage.
If the Government's taxation changes were going to be fiscally neutral, as it has claimed, Seymour wanted to know why make a tax system more complicated to get the same amount of revenue?
The first part of Ardern's answer has been well rehearsed: To make it fairer.
But the second part left the grizzlies in no doubt that change is on the way. Almost every member country of the OECD manages to deal with what's asserted to be a complicated capital gains tax, Ardern shouted above the din, then why can't we?
