John Armstrong

Put to one side reform of the RMA.

What if the Government toiled night and day for years to create a market for the right to house the poor and downtrodden, only for no-one to bother to turn up when it finally opened?Such a scenario might well be the stuff of nightmares for Bill English.

The new political year has barely got into first gear, but one senior politician who should know better has already tried to pull the wool over the public's eyes.

The voters are always right. Even when they are wrong, they are right. So observed Mike Moore after Labour suffered election defeat under his leadership in the early 1990s.

It was all rather shabby, shoddy and shameful.

Gerry Brownlee is one of National's most level-headed, collected, unflappable and even-tempered Cabinet ministers.

This past week has surely been the most difficult and ultimately demeaning one in the otherwise stellar political career of one John Phillip Key.

The next time the Prime Minister delivers a speech on something as fundamental as national security and the potential for Islamic State-inspired terrorism to happen in New Zealand, the Greens should read it carefully, rather than making assumptions about its content and consequently missing or dismissing what he is really saying.

Not so long ago, any Green MP who suggested some herbal concoction to ward off Ebola would surely have been deemed by his or her colleagues to be guilty only of being eccentric.

Rust never sleeps. And neither, it seems, does John Key.

It is the bugger's muddle to beat all such muddles. It is hard to know where to start. Or hazard a guess when it will finish.

Is brand ''Labour'' depreciating so rapidly in electoral value that the party's long-term future is now in serious jeopardy?

It could have all gone horribly wrong for John Key during the leaders' debate in Christchurch last Tuesday evening.

If - as the participants keep insisting - this election is really about ''the things that matter'', then the question of which of the two major parties has the economic agenda with the most foresight would be dominating the campaign.

One question - and one question only - lingers like flashing neon on a moonless night as the Nicky Hager-instigated political firestorm of the last 10 days finally seems to be burning itself out, if only gradually.

The tirade of insults, invective and scorn directed at Nicky Hager must rank as one of the most sustained efforts by National to destroy an individual's credibility since the party's political witch trials of the Muldoon era.

You cannot teach an old dog new tricks, but try telling Winston Peters that.

What next, minister? New Zealand's Got Talent?

The time has come for Kim Dotcom to put up or shut up.