In what is ominously but obviously fast becoming a year-long de facto election campaign, you can guarantee National will try and drum one particular message into voters' brains in coming months.
John Key's U-turn on working with Winston Peters was utterly predictable.
You can count on three questions of national and international note dominating conversations when those of a political bent gather around the barbecue during the Christmas-New Year break.
Some of his victims never saw it coming.
A mixture of grin quickly swallowed up by grimace swept across John Key's face following Colin Craig's intellectually lazy and politically stupid verbal doodling on the non-question of whether man has actually walked on the moon.
Stetsons at dawn? Even in their wildest moments of untrammelled optimism, the Greens - along with the wider environmental lobby - would struggle to come up with something which so marvellously helps their cause to quite the degree that the Anadarko Petroleum Corporation has managed to do.
So, for failing the families of the dead, a bunch of company directors and their chief executives are going to be wined and dined by the prime minister.
Allies and enemies of David Cunliffe are fast discovering Labour's leader of two months is something of a two-headed hydra: it seems at times there are two David Cunliffes - one speaking from the heart, the other speaking from both sides of his mouth.
The song says you can't beat Wellington on a good day. Even a bad day, too.
Well might the Biblical warning about reaping what you sow haunt David Cunliffe as he delivers his first speech to a Labour Party conference as leader.
Let those oracles of politics - the opinion polls - speak their mind and put the confused inhabitants of Parliament Buildings out of their misery by answering the only question which matters: has the political landscape really changed during the shift in time from BC (Before Cunliffe) to AD (After David)?
David Cunliffe had been Labour leader for barely 24 hours before he was boldly declaring he had put his party on a ''war footing''.
Cometh the hour, cometh Cunliffe?
On the face of it, Labour would seem deserving of much applause for rule changes which now make the election of the party's leader a far better exercise in democracy.
There is an old saying that being the Leader of the Opposition is the worst job in politics. The role has one rather large thing going for it, however.
A boadicea with a Mona Lisa smile plus a wickedly infectious chuckle to boot?
Just when you think the prime minister's pragmatic streak has surely drunk for too long at the well of political convenience, John Key promptly undertakes an even more audacious departure from the ideological ethos supposedly guiding his party.
Journalists are by nature deeply suspicious of politicians and the motives which drive them, and vice-versa.
It is a rare day in Parliament that someone gets the better of Winston Peters.
Don't write the Maori Party off yet.
