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# Out Wit, Out Play, Out Last
- URL: https://goodoil.news/out-wit-out-play-out-last/
- Published: 2023-01-22T19:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2024-07-17T16:55:33.000Z
- Author: Cam Slater
- Tags: NZ, NZ Politics, Politics, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2024-07-16 22:34

Politics is the ultimate game of survivor, and it isn’t scripted by cheesy screen writers and television producers. There are many, many sayings about politics but they all say the same thing essentially: that you are in the game until you are not, then the phone stops ringing.

And so New Zealand has a new Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister. Chris Hipkins and Carmel Sepuloni are the latest to lead the Red Tribe, albeit temporarily.

They have six months to turn things around before the election campaign starts in earnest. There is no time to do anything legislative, short of axing unpopular and ineffective reforms that are costing them dearly. But reverse ferreting on Three Waters will be just as costly as forging ahead with it. The health reforms will prove over winter to be an unmitigated disaster. The polytechnic reforms, overseen by Chris Hipkins himself, are also an unmitigated disaster.

Jacinda Ardern has left a poisoned chalice. Neither she nor the country have any ‘gas in the tank’ anymore. The economy is in tatters, the numbers on benefits are growing at an increasing pace, crime is out of control, the roads have more potholes than surface and we can’t even buy basics like eggs. These things, the small and annoying things, are what costs a government the treasury benches.

Six months is not enough time to effect changes. Labour couldn’t organise a root in a brothel with a fist full of fifties, and now we have two more people who are going to try to tell us that everything is great and that we should give them another chance.

By choosing Chris Hipkins, a man trained in the nasty by Trevor Mallard himself, Labour has signalled the end of kindness and the return of the Nasty Party. He can’t help himself. When he isn’t smearing three innocent women who travelled North with permission, or attacking Charlotte Bellis and enforcing Ardern’s draconian Covid policies, he’s sucking up to unions and pushing a hard-left agenda. The election campaign is going to be awesome with Hipkins in charge of Labour. It’ll be bloody, nasty and vicious: it’s all he knows. I’m going to love it.

So he has six months to do something, probably massive unaffordable bribes in what will be Grant Robertson’s last budget, then cling on and hope he doesn’t beat Bill English’s ignominious record for the lowest party vote.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/31/f4/31f4e20a-0315-499e-83ff-139e8eab53bf/content/images/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/325414497_614126093813078_8909870589260448144_n.jpg)

Photoshopped image credit Pixy. The BFD.

In nine months, the tribe will have spoken and I will have outwitted, outplayed and outlasted yet another Prime Minister.

Meanwhile Ardern packs her bags. She’s gone, thank God, and now she will learn that when you are no longer important, the phone simply stops ringing.

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![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/31/f4/31f4e20a-0315-499e-83ff-139e8eab53bf/content/images/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/shutterstock_214223668_1_pxoz38x.jpg)

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