Kate Hawkesby: I’m bordering on feeling sorry for Chris Hipkins

I’m bordering on feeling sorry for Chris Hipkins - and I’ll tell you why.

He’s single-handedly being the face of the entire Government day in day out and spinning so much BS that it must be giving him a headache.

I mean the level of ‘creative facts’ shall we call them, being espoused, is truly award winning.

Yesterday he even tried to blame an international TikTok trend which has only just blown up, on our ram raid stats.

He tried the old ‘it’s an international problem’ routine that he trots out for all our problems - he tried to make it sound like kids filming themselves committing crimes like ram raids was a global thing and we were just unfortunately somehow caught up in it.

Sadly, what the advisors who peddled him this spin to espouse did not tell him, was that our ram raids have absolutely nothing to do with TikTok.

The international TikTok trend disturbing people currently is young people breaking into people’s homes and filming their reactions. That’s very different to taking a stolen car and a crow bar and smashing your way through a front door and trashing and stealing from a shop.

And that’s before we get to the fact that ram raids here have been happening for months and months now - far longer than this international TikTok trend has been around.

But he’s being let down not just by the people advising him, but also by his ministers.

Ginny Andersen this week hung him out to dry by peddling so much BS of her own that he spent the rest of the time mopping up her mess. He had to appear in several interviews walking back her claims that we all feel safer and that there's no more crime there's just more reporting of it.

He’s got Grant there so disinterested and so obviously checked out these days that he doesn’t really care what happens, so Hipkins really is last man standing.

He’s mopping up the mess that Jacinda created then upped and walked out on, covering for the mess that is his Cabinet, and all the while he must know deep down that this government is on a hiding to nothing.

You can’t wreck a country to this degree over five years and keep blaming international trends or global patterns.

I think this Government would actually go a long way to rebuilding people’s faith in them if they actually stopped denying and deflecting and gaslighting, and just started admitting some stuff they’ve got wrong.

If they started telling it like it is.

His call for us all to be more positive and optimistic is a stretch. I bumped into a neighbour yesterday who said he’s not attended political party meetings before but he’s starting now, he’s that riled up by what’s happening to this country.

Ironically, he was going to a National party meeting, as he said that party needed a rocket under it as they didn’t seem to grasp how frustrated and over it voters are.

I think the Opposition do understand how over it voters are, but they’re just a bit caught up in trying to please the middle voter, so they’re sitting on the fence too much.

But I keep coming back to the old adage, despite what the polls say, oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them.

And if you look at the state of this country right now, and if those who choose to turn a blind eye to it all get really honest for a minute, then even Hipkins must know what we all know, that we can’t possibly continue the way we are.

Kate Hawkesby is a political broadcaster on Newstalk ZB - her articles can be seen HERE.