It’s only Thursday morning and it’s possible there’s still time left for a Friday afternoon dump of some other bad news or report or something they are hoping to hide while we’ve all wandered off to the pub.
The clickbait troubleof the week, the here-and-now drama, has been the tragedy at the dairy in Sandringham.
It crystallised in one event, the carnage of thousands of retail crimes that had gone unanswered and largely ignored.
The fact the Prime Minister pushed on with her Chatham Island gig is another sign that if she ever had any link to the common folk, it’s gone.
Jacinda Ardern’s excuse was the grief of the family and the ongoing police investigation, and yet the day after, clearly having been got to by those who saw this as the PR disaster it was, she got in touch and followed it up with a press conference.
The package announced on Tuesday wasn’t a lot better.
The PM told us she wanted us to feel “safe” going to work, as though that was a new thought and hadn’t occurred to her in the prior months where thousands have gone to work and seen their lives and businesses tipped upside down (literally and figuratively) over and over again, while being told the fog cannons and paperwork in the first tranche were working when they weren’t.
She told us Tuesday’s package had in fact been talked about, in a desperate bid to try and convince the sceptical that her government had not been asleep at the wheel.
Chris Hipkins looks more over it by the day.
Chris Hipkins, who looks more and more over it by the day, was peppered with questions in the House last week about the abject failure of fog cannon part 1, and never mentioned the discussions, almost as though they didn’t actually exist.
The PM’s failing on Tuesday was to try a trick that is now so tired and so worn out no one believes her any more: the reset of the conversation, a few lines of reassurance, a bit of a headline for the gallery chooks to hoover up and repeat on their platforms, accompanied by the obligatory splash of cash.
It was so bad, they even had to admit the fog cannons are as hard to get as installers, so the answer wasn’t actually the answer until next year, which means it’s no answer at all.
But then we got to Three Waters, and the entrenchment ... or attempt at entrenchment.
This is a more profound crime than just regular crime.
This is the sign of a government that is out of control.
The simplest of questions: how is it possible the Government tries to gerrymander the Constitution and the way we run the country, without the Prime Minister knowing about it, and if that’s true, which I find almost impossible to believe, how does a Prime Minister get that out of touch?
Or if she did know, how is it possible that you find Three Waters, a policy that has been poison from day one, so magnetically important that you would see your Government fall because of it?
A policy that wasn’t campaigned on.
A policy rejected by councils and people up and down the country.
A policy that started with three waters then got switched to five, once again out of select committee — the same select committee that had more than 80,000 submissions, most of whom rejected it.
A policy you are so hung up on you’d enrage every constitutional law expert in the country to try and get through?
Talk about a death wish.
The sum total is every day this week, the Government has seen an avalanche of bad news, upset, anger, protest and disbelief, from one end of the country to the other, and I haven’t even got to the recession yet.
All governments have bad weeks, all governments eventually run out of puff, but a year out, this one is setting new records in setting fire to itself.
