KEY POINTS:
The year in politics was marked by clever quips and quotable quotes:
"There will be no move against Don Brash - a poll like that, that's from heaven for a political party."
* MP Maurice Williamson says National's rating in the polls give his leader a cloak of invincibility. A few months later, Dr Brash walks the plank.
"Corporal punishment is the ideal remedy for youths running amok in public. The best thing you can do for them is a thick ear."
* National MP John Hayes enters the debate on youth justice.
"Schoolboy smutty rumours."
* Prime Minister Helen Clark dismisses gossip about her husband.
"Honest Don is beginning to look like Mr Magoo [an error-prone cartoon character] lacking in political nous and constantly snatching defeat from the jaws of victory."
* Dr Brash's former chief of staff Richard Long continued the death of a thousand cuts on his old boss.
"Labour regards Dr Brash as a corrosive and cancerous person within the New Zealand political system."
* Helen Clark, blaming Dr Brash for the nasty political atmosphere as he refuses to stop calling Labour corrupt.
"I disagree with everything that Labour does but they are not corrupt. Devious and cunning, yes. Not corrupt."
* Act leader Rodney Hide disagrees with National and says if Dr Brash was correct then his party was corrupt as well "but less successful".
"I'm thinking of asking the Minister of Police for a Taser gun for Trevor."
* Helen Clark tries to distance herself from her minister Trevor Mallard referring to Dr Brash's personal life.
"When you look at it from the outside, it's either incompetence or political bias."
* Don Brash attacks the police for not prosecuting Labour over breaches of election spending laws.
"It's like trying to change the rules of the game after it's all over and the ref's blown the whistle."
* Helen Clark takes offence at the Auditor-General ruling that money intended for parliamentary purposes was unlawfully spent on electioneering.
"We won't pay the money back."
* Labour Minister Pete Hodgson, gets a bit ahead of the Government's script by ruling out any repayment of Parliamentary Services funding for election campaign material.
"I can only conclude that I am being removed from office because I stood up to the Government as an independent regulator should."
* Electricity Commissioner Roy Hemmingway makes it clear he is unhappy about his contract not being renewed.
"An orchestrated litany of Thais,"
* National MP Maurice Williamson's observation on embattled Labour MP Taito Phillip Field's cover story for hiring Thais to work on his home in Samoa.
"My future is clear. I intend to continue as the Labour MP for Mangere,"
* Taito Phillip Field seems unable to see the storms raging around him the day before police announce a formal corruption investigation.
"On my lower leg, if you must know, and that's the end of the prognosis."
* Foreign Minister Winston Peters says where he was bitten by an insect before coming down with a mysterious disease and denying rumours he sat on a spider.
"There's a lot of manure in politics. There's a lot of stuff you would not want flying around your ears."
* Outgoing Cabinet Minister Jim Sutton announcing his retirement from Parliament.
"I am sure we agree, these bastards are our enemy."
* Former TVNZ chairman Craig Boyce expresses his views on some MPs in an internal memo.
- NZPA
