Here are a few.
The NAIT animal tracking system developed by the previous Labour-led government was not enforced and therefore allowed to founder under National meaning that when Micoplasma bovis hit the farming sector, it was that much more difficult to eradicate.
In another planning failure, National managed to leave the country short of 800 school teachers. This is a difficult mistake to explain. The ability to predict how many kids are going to show up at school in any year must be one of the easiest statistical exercises there is.
National also operated a wide-open door immigration policy. This was probably because New Zealand is about the only country on earth that allows non-citizen immigrants with just permanent residence to vote and National saw political advantage in this policy.
Certainly, electorates like Botany that largely accommodated this human flood turn out to be safe National seats – surprise, surprise!
The resulting growth put heavy stress on New Zealand's infrastructure of schools, roads, hospitals and all the other government-funded services just at the time National brought down what it proudly called "zero budgets" and plotted tax cuts for the already well-off.
National also deferred hospital maintenance to the point that some buildings look beyond repair and designed a new census system that is so out of touch with reality that the whole exercise may have to be repeated.
The new administration deserves credit for taking these problems in its stride and even its most determined critics admit that it has made real progress in implementing the policies of the three parties that make up what will be remembered as the Ardern Government.
Overall, 2018 was politically positive in many ways.
I've always been attracted to the idea of watershed moments and I think looking back that there were a few this year.
According to the online dictionary I consulted a watershed literally means an area or ridge of land that separates waters flowing to different rivers, basins, or seas and figuratively, an event marking a turning point in a situation.
Our Prime Minister became a mother and took parental leave. This rightly drew international attention and showed New Zealand in a deservedly positive light.
That was a watershed moment and the next time it happens it will hardly be worth a mention.
Winston Peters was acting Prime Minister for six weeks and filled the role with grace and aplomb, another watershed moment that will not be noticed next time it happens.
It was a year when a truly iconic picture was published - and that is a very rare event indeed.
A pregnant Prime Minister, wearing a gorgeous Maori cloak, meeting a radiantly beaming Queen Elizabeth must join the ranks of sublime political images like Norman Kirk taking the hand of that Maori child at Waitangi all those years ago.
Our girl stole the whole show and even the most rusted-on of National Party supporters must have felt a twinge of pride.
Since the time of Rogernomics, wealth inequality has worsened in this country to the point that luxury vehicle sales set new records year after year while poor families line up in ever increasing numbers for food parcels.
This malignant trend is at last getting reversed with the Government's first budget meaning that most of the poorest families found themselves around $75 a week better off. That was another watershed moment.
The message of the French economist Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-first Century is that the normal workings of the capitalist economic system inevitably create inequality over time.
The logical political message from this key insight is that governments alone can reverse this tendency through budgetary measures that redistribute incomes from the well-off to the poor.
Finance Minister Grant Robertson's first budget began the process of redistribution and will have new social targets incorporated into budget 2019.
My final watershed moment was Clarke Gayford's tweet about getting sprung with his jet-lagged baby daughter watching cage wrestling "in their underpants" in the middle of the night during the United Nations visit.
In a deliciously witty stroke, Clarke elevated active fatherhood to blokish good fun and established a much-needed role model.
Mike Williams grew up in Hawke's Bay. He is CEO of the NZ Howard League and a former Labour Party president. All opinions are his and not those of Hawke's Bay Today.
