On Sunday, the govt released its so called “Clean Car Discount Policy”. By mid morning Monday, a mass of angry talkback callers, (monitored by Labour’s in house informers), had expressed their intense dislike of the policy, and the govt was getting nervous.

During the afternoon, TV One published a flurry of stories on Ardern’s planned apology for the “Dawn Raids”

It soon became obvious that the rashly conceived and authoritarian scheme, interfering harshly with voters freedom to choose the vehicle they want to drive, had unleashed a wave of discontent.

By midday, an emergency meeting was called where a recovery strategy was mapped out. The media quickly found a raft of other matters to be concerned about.

Suddenly it was timely to issue an apology for the so called “dawn raids” that occurred way back in 1970. There was an announcement (yes, another) that the apology would be forthcoming “later this month”.

Stories followed accentuating the injustice of the raids and the Clean Car Policy story had already begun slipping into the background.

The next story, sympathetic to Ms Ardern was the claimed misleading of the PM in the matter of an interview conducted by a book writer more than a year ago. The book was published eight days ago, and Jacinda knew of the claimed issues long before then. Like the announcement about the apology, this was also suddenly important today.

All up, TV One ran about six stories on the apology, and the book, and another story on Arthur Allan Thomas going to court in ten days time. By five o’clock in the evening there was no mention at all of the Clean Car Discount Policy to be found among the 50 plus news items on TV One’s main news page.

Later in the night, well after peak hours, a news item did appear, but was relegated to a space way down on the main news page.

So by the end of the day, the uprising over the poorly conceived Clean Car Policy had been successfully quelled and the public were now talking about other things. A win for the PM’s media dept and her cronies at TV One.

A Jacinda fan could scoff at the above and claim this was all coincidence. Then again, there’s an old saying in politics- “nothing is ever a coincidence”.

(There’s more news though, and its for Jacinda and her media managers. This isn’t over yet you smug manipulative toadies. There’s more to come. Much more. You don’t know what you’ve started.)