A member of New Zealand's biggest political party has admitted to an affair with a fellow married MP and says there's plenty more "bed-hopping" going on.
While Kiwis have this year made a sport of mocking the bedlam of Australian politics, New Zealand's centre-right National Party has this week given its neighbours a run for their money.
After being accused of leaking information, MP Jami-Lee Ross on Monday announced he was quitting in a fiery, hour-long press conference during which he accused his party and opposition leader, Simon Bridges, of electoral fraud, and laid out a bag-full of insults against his former boss.
It went downhill from there.
Mr Ross laid a complaint with police, alleging Mr Bridges had asked for a $100,000 donation from a Chinese businessman with links to the Communist Party to be broken up so its source could be hidden, and released a secret recording in which Mr Bridges, talking about potential new candidates, said "two Chinese would be nice".
Mr Bridges strongly denies any wrongdoing and says the donations came from a group of individuals.
The tape also included Mr Bridges describing one of his lower-ranking MPs as "f***ing useless", for which he has apologised.
The following day, reports emerged on website Newsroom accusing Mr Ross - who is married with children - of two unhealthy but consensual sexual affairs, as well as bullying two other women.
He has denied the allegations of harassment but on Friday evening took to live radio and admitted to two affairs, one long-term with a married member of parliament and another with a former staffer.
"I owe my wife a huge apology. I have done some things that I am not proud of," he told Newstalk ZB.
"The bottom line is I haven't been a good husband."
The organisation has chosen not to name the other MP.
But the chaos is unlikely to end soon.
Mr Ross now says he won't quit, but will instead remain in his Botany seat to keep sniping at his former party, claiming "the rules of the game have changed".
"There's a lot of bed-hopping that goes on down in that parliament," he said.
"There's a lot of behaviour that a lot of people would want kept secret and has been kept secret until now. But the way in which we now play politics is that we lift the bedsheets and we start getting into that detail."
National is the largest party in New Zealand's parliament, holding 56 of 120 seats, compared to the coalition-government-leading Labour Party's 46.
Australian Associated Press
