Hosking on a Government defined by hopelessness

Mike Hosking writes:

It is one of the older tricks in the book, when you’re the government and you’re in trouble, dump the bad news on Friday.

This current Government is excellent at it. And this past Friday was Derek Handley.

The previous Friday was the Curran resignation, other Fridays have also involved the revelation of the Curran meeting and, of course, the Meka Whaitiri scandal.

All on Fridays. All designed to be lost in the Friday hubbub of people at the pub, going away for the weekend, watching the All Blacks, and generally by Monday putting it behind them.

The Friday bad news dumps are becoming so obvious I ran a poll on when they would release the Whaitiri inquiring findings:

On which day of the week will the PM announce the findings of the inquiry into Meta Whaitiri’s treatment of staff?

— David Farrar (@dpfdpf) September 17, 2018

As you can see Friday is winning.

What made the latest Friday dump so egregious is that Derek Handley, and I hadn’t realised this until the revelation, had moved his entire family home from New York for a job that got butchered.

And the best we got was Meghan Woods, the Prime Minister was missing in action again, Meghan Woods saying it could have been handled better.

No kidding, Sherlock.

A bloke moves his whole family halfway round the world to get shafted by incompetence, no wonder he’s ropeable.

Is very unfair on Handley.

Anyway the upshot is he’s been shafted, Curran is a disgrace, Ardern is, yet again, being shown to be a combination of weak and absent.

And it is yet another example of this lot, mainly Labour, doing everything possible to make themselves look inept.

Now, if there is a light at the end of this calamitous tunnel, it’s that my gut says it won’t hurt them in the polls.

Two years out from the next vote, most of us are getting on with life, rather than peering at Wellington with a microscope.

This is true. Polls tend to move over stuff like jobs, incomes, hospitals, schools.

The economy is the thing that really turns sentiment. And there is plenty in that particular storm still brewing, and I have no doubt it will bite them in the bum badly. 

And Trump has just imposed $200 billion of tariffs on China.