Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern can draw comfort from the fact that due process was served and her troublesome MP from Hamilton West was balloted out of the caucus on August 23.

But the question, and it is one the Labour Party leader will struggle to answer, is whether expelled MP Gaurav Sharma has been silenced.

As an independent MP, marooned in Parliament by his party caucus, Sharma is no longer gagged by party discipline.

In his post-expulsion musings to the media, Sharma has hinted at an unfinished personal agenda and the lack of proper closure to the issue of workplace bullying at the party caucus meeting that did not go into “the specifics.”

Despite, or perhaps because of, his change of status within Parliament, Sharma continues to push for an independent investigation, whose terms of reference would include himself.

Sharma is invoking the right of the first mover, saying he was the one who “raised concerns regarding my staff, not the other way around.”

According to him, “that’s when the bullying from the whips started.”

In hindsight, it was perhaps disingenuous and politically naïve for the beleaguered MP to imagine that the party leadership would spring to action and be prompted to launch an independent inquiry into bullying claims raised by its MP via the media.

Sharma argues in his own defence that when that didn’t happen and the “prime minister said there wasn’t any bullying, I had to then release the screenshots.”

That exposed him to the charge of choosing media over mediation, which amounted to breach of trust. Sharma’s by-line on the Op-ed piece published in a local daily on August 11 was akin to a calling card left at the crime scene.                  

But though the feisty MP has claimed the tacit support of fellow MPs who he says are groaning under the whiplash of chief whip Kieran McAnulty, who the prime minister has stoutly defended, it is patently clear that what has played out in the public domain is a proxy war between Sharma and Ardern.

Ardern’s statement in the wake of the MP’s expulsion was a deadpan articulation of House rules. But it bore the gravitas of a royal decree from the party monarch banishing an errant subject from the realm.

Sharma would no longer receive support from the party, or have access to the caucus in any way. He would have the right to attend select committees, but would not be a member of one, Ardern ruled.

But Ardern is clearly anxious to close the file on the matter and move on, saying “our focus remains on the significant issues New Zealanders are grappling with and our responsibility to serve them -- not the interests of an individual MP.”

When pared down to its simplest elements, the storm in the debating chamber is a semantic quibble that revolves around the definition of “bullying”.

New Zealand’s parliamentary lexicon sheds no light on the matter, it would appear.

As long as bullying is not strictly defined under Parliament’s code of conduct rules, it would be difficult to establish a violation and any independent investigation would likely be inconclusive.

Both accuser and accused are two sides of the same coin.