Buried treasures: A not so merry Christmas

News Management 101 dictates that if politicians want to bury unsavoury matters - or embarrassing reports - their spin doctors dump them on the eve of a major public holiday.

The rationale is that journalists who are often seeking to get out the door themselves will merely give the issue cursory treatment.

The spin doctors hope that by the time the public get back to work they will not want to be faced with "old news".

In the case of a long holiday break - like Christmas-New Year - the thinking is that the public will not want to be snowed under by too many weighty issues as they take time off.

Christmas 2003 prompted an extraordinary avalanche of "buried treasures" which had hardly seen the light of day before New Zealanders departed for a holiday.

As political journalist KEVIN TAYLOR reports today, there are strong feelings among business about the timing of a raft of employment-related legislation dumped just before Christmas. There are suggestions the late timing was due to a division within the Cabinet - not a desire to bury the news or create ill-feelings within the business sector. Whatever the motivation - the ill-feelings are there.

In our week-long series we will also shed more light on other controversial issues that were effectively buried by the pre-Christmas avalanche: The approval to insert a new gene into onions to withstand the weedkiller glyphosate, the spending habits of Dr Ross Armstrong - former chair of three Government entities and former friend of the Prime Minister; a clampdown on Government contracts prompted by the Donna Awatere Huata affair and the end to one of New Zealand's longest-running legal sagas - the Law Society's stoush with legal firm Russell McVeagh.

The buried treasures we have chosen are not an exhaustive list - but just some of those that deserve to be unearthed for greater public attention.