This week on the Raw Politics podcast: Are the wheels falling off the Labour light rail car, is the government's battery running low or is a fatalism at work leading to the run of ministerial errors and embarrassments.


The Raw Politics team tries to fathom the strange cases of Michael Wood, Stuart Nash and their errant colleagues who have inexplicably started to drag down their new leader and government.

Political editor Jo Moir believes things have gotten ridiculous and weird, with indications of a lack of regard for the office held by Chris Hipkins.

The team also looks at Hipkins' important journey to China, beginning on June 26 and how trying such a highly sensitive diplomatic mission might be for a relative newbie.

This week's question asks if there is structural racism in the health system or if National's Christopher Luxon is right that it's wrong to base clinical decisions on ethnicity. Newsroom co-editor Tim Murphy argues Luxon would be right, that it'd wrong to base clinical judgments on race, but that's not what's going on - he's taken one element out of a complex matrix and made it his everything.


Every Friday, Newsroom editors and political journalists talk through the big issues and scrutinise politicians’ performances in a lively 25-minute show aiming to take viewers and listeners inside the actions and motivations of our elected leaders.

Watch Raw Politics on YouTube, or download or listen to it as a podcast on Spotify, or via Apple Podcasts. And send us your burning political questions to sam.sachdeva@newsroom.co.nz and we’ll endeavour to find the answer and explain the issues.