Mike's Minute: Hipkins is a hypocrite on tax

The Mike Hosking Breakfast

I've been surprised this week by the amount of coverage Chris Hipkins managed to get himself around tax.

If you think about it, he didn't say anything specific, and certainly nothing new. The left generally argue the tax system is not fair.

The trouble is he had a chance to do something about it but, living up to the ongoing reputation of his and Ardern's Government, failed to deliver.

Part of the story about the story is, I suspect, two things were at play. The first is that it has been a very quiet week locally for news.

And two is the media, in general, are still sympathetic to the Labour cause.

The Labour Party have also moved onto the Disability Minister Penny Simmonds, who made a hash of the detail around funding and has since apologised.

But she's also been humiliated by her own party, who now require decisions in the area to be passed by Cabinet.

That has led to Hipkins calling for her to be sacked, which of course isn't going to happen.

Simmonds is the new target after the original target, Casey Costello, basically stared Labour down over tobacco by turning out not to be the shambles in terms of information requests they tried to make her out to be, then announcing that crackdown on vapes last week that basically put Labour to shame, given it's exactly the sort of thing they should have done but, once again, failed to deliver on.

Which brings us back to tax. Whether because of a quiet week, or by sympathy, surely someone other than me needed to ask themselves why you would give the level of coverage you did to a thought bubble, given the thought bubbler was the abject failure who failed to introduce and make law the very thing he is now bubbling about?

Talk about a hypocrite.

You long for Government to make the changes, to espouse, only to fail to do so, then in the first major speech you give you re-espouse the core topic that you did nothing about, by moaning about it some more!

What's worse, the media cover it as though it's worth a discussion, despite the fact it got discussed and has been discussed for several elections in a row and still nothing has been done.

It's like there is an industry in hot air.

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