KEY POINTS:
The National Party should carry on celebrating Saturday's resounding victory for all its worth. The hangover has yet to come - it is going to be a doozie when it does.
In the next couple of days, sombre officials with suits to match will make the short journey from the Treasury and Reserve Bank to the Opposition wing in Parliament Buildings. They could well be mistaken for undertakers. They will not bring glad tidings.
They will brief Prime Minister-elect John Key and Finance Minister-in-waiting Bill English on updated forecasts covering economic growth (the lack of it), likely jobless numbers and the crimson state of the Government's accounts.
As a taster, the Treasury warned Key during the election campaign that the outlook had deteriorated on the already gloomy figures in the pre-election fiscal update.
"Deteriorated" is Treasury-speak for "we're in the cactus, mate".
National MPs were yesterday cheerfully talking of the "challenge" now confronting them. That, too, was a massive understatement.
Not since 1990, when Jim Bolger returned to Wellington the day after the election to be told the then largely state-owned Bank of New Zealand needed a massive injection of cash, has an incoming Government faced such fiscal horrors.
The betting is this time it is going to be far worse. This time National will not wreck its honeymoon with voters by slashing government spending and putting the economy into even deeper recession. But the honeymoon will be over soon enough once business closures and redundancies escalate.
For Key and English, the rush to set up a Government is about more than just assuming power. National needs to start exercising it as soon as possible.
The big bonus for National is that Saturday night produced a near-perfect result for the party. Plagued by Winston Peters for two decades, National is finally rid of him. The party is ecstatic about that.
National fell tantalisingly short of being able to govern alone, but the electorate has given it a very strong mandate for change.
With Act and United Future's Peter Dunne on board, National can run what should be a stable coalition or minority Government arrangement with the two like-minded parties.
If there is a worry, it is Act. Although he may be United Future's only MP, Dunne was quick to lay claim to being the centrist force on National's left to balance Act's five MPs on National's right.
While Act propped up a National Administration for a time in the 1990s, this is its first experience of Government. Its capacity for compromise will be repeatedly and rigorously tested.
Key's ruling out the uncompromising figure of Sir Roger Douglas as minister, inside or outside his Cabinet, means everyone at least knows where they stand.
National is trying to quarantine itself from Sir Roger. It will also want to keep Act's likely two ministers away from big-spending but politically sensitive portfolios such as Social Development, Education and Health.
Sir Roger, however, is not returning to Parliament just to spend his days feeding patsy questions to National ministers.
At the back of National's mind will be the lingering fear that the Act founder and upholder of Act doctrine may corrode Act-National relations, even to the point of Act pulling out of coalition with National.
Enter the Maori Party.
Its leadership will meet its National counterpart tomorrow, ostensibly to discuss an arrangement which might see the Maori Party abstain on confidence votes in return for concessions as the first move in cementing a long-term relationship between the two parties.
However, the flip side in doing that is National is seeking some insurance against things going wrong elsewhere.
