Kate Hawkesby: I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at this point for the Labour Party

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at this point for the Labour Party and Chris Hipkins. I mean the state of it.

It really is from the sublime to the ridiculous. Who's left?

Who around that Cabinet table is capable enough to seriously manage all the portfolios of the other ministers who are dropping like flies? It’s a shambles.

But is it all a shambles of their own making? Have they played a bit fast and loose with the rules, been a bit slow to react, a bit slow to follow up on anything, a bit cavalier about the importance of being beyond reproach?

Is it arrogance? Is it incompetence?

The PM sounded absolutely fed up with Michael Wood yesterday and I’m not surprised. Wood hung him out to dry.

How you can claim to be so busy and so important that you don’t run a ruler over your potential personal conflicts of interest is beyond me.

Especially when you’ve already been in the gun for conflict of interest - how do you take that long to clarify any other conflicts of interest?

I initially defended Wood as being probably just a decent guy who’d stuffed up. But now I’m not so sure. Is he decent? Or reckless? Or arrogant? Or both?

But imagine being Chippy right now. Week after week after week, distractions and implosions in your own party, in your own cabinet, that keep undermining what your government is trying to do.

I mean don’t get me wrong, what this government is trying to do is nothing short of disastrous at the moment anyway, but this is a major distraction Hipkins doesn’t need.

He sounded angry and over it. He threw his former Transport Minister right under his much loved bus in saying he was disappointed and it was ‘deeply frustrating’.

And we are frustrated as voters too. Frustrated this keeps happening, frustrated that this clown show is still bumbling along unable to follow its own rules, unable to discern what’s appropriate or not appropriate.

It’s laughable, but as I said before, do we laugh or do we cry?

They’re a joke, but the tragedy is many New Zealanders still take them seriously. But how can voters trust that this Government’s abiding all the rules? How much confidence do you have in their transparency? Honesty? Openness? Are we still falling for that?

Speaking of transparency, Nicola Willis alleged yesterday in Parliament that Grant Robertson’s been looking at some further tweaks to tax and has been seeking advice on possible options for increasing or decreasing income tax.

Grant Robertson wouldn’t answer about it, she asked if he could rule out tax changes rejected by Cabinet re-emerging as part of the Labour party manifesto. Robertson would only say the manifesto’s not finished yet.

Nicola Willis took the public interest route – that we deserve to know what the Government’s planning re tax. Robertson wouldn’t budge. So what do we deduce from that?

That tax changes are coming as part of the Labour election campaign, you can almost bank on that. But we don’t know exactly what because Grant wouldn’t answer.

What we should be working out by now as voters, is how much we trust this Government, how much we trust what they do with our hard earned money, and whether they can get their act together in a cohesive way between now and October.

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