KEY POINTS:
Winding up his Oval Office meeting with Helen Clark on Wednesday, George Bush told reporters his conversation with New Zealand's Prime Minister had been so constructive he had decided to invite her to stay for lunch.
He was joking, of course. Clark's lunch date at the White House had long been penned into her schedule of engagements in Washington and was the big-ticket advance on her previous foray in 2002. On that occasion, lunch was further down the pecking order, courtesy of Colin Powell at the State Department prior to her discussions with Bush.
The upgrade to the White House dining room provided the necessary symbolism to illustrate bilateral relations had become even stronger in the intervening five years, thereby ensuring the latest visit could be deemed a success before Helen Clark had even stepped foot in Washington.
However, from the perspective of Wellington, the pictures from inside the Washington Beltway were a reminder that much else has changed five years on.
Clark's minority Government falls a long way short of the lame-duck status being accorded to the Bush Administration.
But there is a real danger of Labour being tagged with that label, especially in Parliament where its loss of its legislative majority is increasingly making it look exactly that.
Clark does not have an Iraq or an equivalent albatross hanging around her neck.
As with any ageing administration, however, the longer it is in place the harder it has to work just to stand still, let alone make progress.
Even she discovered the photo-opportunities and platitudes in Washington were not enough to stifle questions back home as to why New Zealand has failed to make any progress towards a free trade agreement with the United States.
The criticism put her on the defensive at a time when the Government seems to be constantly on the defensive and locked permanently in damage-control mode.
That was amply illustrated by the decision to take urgency on Sue Bradford's anti-smacking bill to get it off the parliamentary agenda as fast as possible so it is no longer an irritant to Labour internally and externally.
That presumes it can get the numbers to put the House into urgency. If Labour does not get the numbers and drops the idea, that will be used by its opponents as another sign it has lost control of Parliament.
Labour's intention to take urgency was rumbled by National's Gerry Brownlee, who suggested it indicated Labour had "lost its bottle".
The question is whether the Government's unwillingness to put up policy or legislation that might be even mildly contentious merely reflects an inability to get the numbers or is the consequence of becoming utterly risk-averse - as the urgency motion would suggest.
While Labour retreats into its shell, its minor party allies - their leverage over Labour having been strengthened by Labour's loss of Phillip Field's vote - are getting restless.
NZ First is becoming more openly critical of Government policies, and the Greens are making a renewed pre-Budget push for more capital spending on public transport with a campaign to get the Government to commit to the electrification of Auckland's rail lines.
The Greens would not be doing that if they were getting some satisfaction from Labour.
Labour is either ignoring or simply choosing not to hear the message that the Greens now expect more recognition in return for their votes.
Labour is distracted, however. The political year is barely two months old.
Yet, the Government is becoming increasingly besieged across major policy fronts, notably law and order, education and health with the turmoil in the Corrections Department, renewed criticism of the NCEA and now the debacle over the contract for laboratory testing in Auckland.
With Corrections going off the boil, if only temporarily, the damning High Court ruling invalidating the $560 million laboratory testing contract could not have been timed better for National to sustain its strategy of painting Labour as a Government where accountability is absent, standards are lax and mismanagement is endemic.
Making those charges stick is more difficult in this case as Health Minister Pete Hodgson was not involved in awarding the contract.
National's Tony Ryall has sought to keep the focus on Hodgson by probing how much the minister knew about the conflict of interest of Auckland District Health Board member and Lab Tests' chief executive Tony Bierre, and, what Hodgson did about it once he was told.
Hodgson relied on information provided by the board that Bierre had stood down from the board long before tendering for the contract began.
But that was not the full story. If Hodgson was kept in the dark about earlier concerns of conflict of interest, that will only increase the pressure on him to sack Wayne Brown and Ross Keenan, the board's chairman and deputy chairman respectively, who are already in the gun for the board's "entirely inadequate" handling of Bierre's conflict of interest.
If Hodgson fails to dismiss the pair - and he has the legislative power to do so - National will accuse him of being weak and indecisive.
Hodgson has so far greeted Opposition calls for heads to roll by refusing to express confidence in either board member, only to then make remarks that might be interpreted as supportive of both.
Hodgson's problem is that the Auckland DHB has markedly lifted its performance across a range of indicators under Brown's and Keenan's guidance. Moreover, in accepting the Lab Tests' bid, the board was responding to the Beehive's demand for DHBs to make cost savings.
On Thursday, the Government shifted tack by trying to lay all the blame on Bierre, claiming he had hoodwinked the board.
But this does not add up. Brown was tipped off about Bierre having a conflict of interest early on in the saga and told him to desist.
Alarm bells should have surely rung when Bierre eventually indicated the company he was running and in which he had a financial stake would be tendering for the contract.
Labour has further tried to muddy the waters by labelling Bierre as a "National stooge" while accusing National's Paul Hutchison, who warned Brown about Bierre, of then sitting on his hands for a year before tipping off Hodgson.
That holding operation was conducted with her usual aplomb by Annette King, who, as a former health minister, stood in for Hodgson who was at a long-scheduled meeting in Christchurch.
Her tour de force was never going to make the problem disappear. But her front-footing of the argument and throwing it back on National was in marked contrast to the confidence-sapping defensiveness elsewhere on the Labour benches, which is driving the Government ever closer to its use-by date.
