What a sorry week for politicians in this country who continue to fail to cover themselves with decency and humanity and any form of leadership.

I could start with the Labour Party’s woeful handling of a second scandal amongst their staff and volunteers. But I’m losing the will to live over this one.

It appears that the Labour Party has no HR department with any competency.  The shameful mishandling of this all the way through is amazing considering that this is the party that talks about wellbeing and is wanting to rewrite the Labour laws.

It moved on to what Jacinda knew and didn’t and when which was reminiscent of the good old days with John Key, who often claimed he hadn’t been advised or wasn’t told about all sorts of misdemeanours amongst the ground staff.

But while this stains the sainthood of Jacinda Ardern it did not throw a golden light on the Opposition. Because despite everything, the victims seemed to be used as pawns in the game of personality politics and it just felt yuck.

Revictimisation of the victims by the powerful of politics just demonstrates the power imbalance that existed right from the get go and continues now as the government’s opponents use the victims hurt for their own advantage.

And there was another incident that ran down my spine like fingernails on a blackboard.

I realised this week that today is six months since the mosque atrocity of March the 15th. It shocked me because it felt so much longer ago. And that upset me because I realised that is what immense shock can do to you.  Slow time until it barely passes while the pain remains.  And that blew me away because I’m just some guy who was on the radio when it happened and so my experience was second hand.

And then I started thinking about how the families and community must be feeling over these 6 months.  Then you hear the mosque advising their people to regularly check for lead poisoning because so many of them still have bullets in their body.

Then the boss of Twitter pops into to see the Prime Minister in Wellington for half an hour and Simon Bridges comes out and says the PM should worry more about the concerns of everyday New Zealanders and I was horrified by that turn of phrase. It stopped me in my tracks

The 51 who died 180 days ago were everyday New Zealanders, Mr Bridges.  And the 1000 people who received Victim Support are also everyday New Zealanders.  And I’m an everyday New Zealander and I’m concerned about social media exploiting pain and hatred and murder.  And I have no problem with our Prime Minister reminding people like Jack Dorsey of their responsibilities.  And if they ignore the request that’s not an indication of our failure but theirs.

But Simon Bridges doesn’t see that.  He has a single minded goal to bloody Jacinda Ardern’s nose for his own personal political goal and from time to time he goes too far.

So from that to the Labour failure on abuse you actually have to ask whether it’s the politicians who aren’t everyday New Zealanders.