KEY POINTS:
John Key will be smiling quietly to himself over the BBQ at his beach house in Omaha this summer. As he turns the chops, he can be content that, while 2007 had a few hiccups, 2008 promises to be an even better year for National ... except for
one small thing.
There is, apparently, one niggle for the party leader. Chortling Labour MPs refer to it as their "neutron bomb". It is a rather scandalous tale about a senior National MP timed to detonate when the election campaign begins.
According to your political persuasion, it is a measure of Key's confidence, his humanity or his lack of political experience that he has not taken the MP concerned out and shot him. He seems willing to risk the damage the ancient scandal might cause rather than the fuss a summary caucus execution might cause.
My guess is that he expects Labour to air the grubby secret too late to have any real impact on National's credibility, and that the party may get sympathy from a public disturbed by Labour's obvious muckraking.
Key tells me, in general, he's happy with the state of the party for election year, and he cites this column when he talks of a few of the speed wobbles he and his team had, declaring they have learned from those mistakes.
For her part, Clark's plan seems to be to put the mistakes of 2007 behind the Government and use the passage of time from the holiday break to allow Labour to start the New Year with a clean slate. Wherever she is holidaying, you can bet she is still mulling over the disastrous blunders in her Cabinet last year, however, and is determined, as she puts it, to "draw a line under them".
Clark wouldn't tell me where she and husband Peter were headed, other than it would be "outdoors". She says she doesn't announce where she is going in case "malign forces" might intervene. I presume she means al Qaeda rather than National or the Exclusive Brethren, but we know she has a penchant for scaling mountains in Africa or Skidooing in the Arctic in her holiday breaks, so she will be somewhere arduously exotic.
She tells me, when it comes to Christmas presents, she pays for the summer holiday while Peter "buys me a CD he wants to listen to". Now that's odd. She forks out 20 grand while dear Peter pays $19.99. Actually, come to think of it, it sums up the Labour Government's approach to many issues, spending a fortune for very little return.
I suspect one of the issues that will grow in the public mind over the next 12 months with damaging implications for the Government, is the growth of the increasingly expensive bureaucracy, the volcanic explosion in government spending in general, and this administration's addiction to hiring expensive consultants and media advisors to convince taxpayers that it is not wasteful.
Key caused a few grumbles in National's caucus before Christmas when he insisted his team would have a minimal break, and he expected them to be working their shadow portfolios throughout the summer.
Education spokeswoman Katherine Rich took him at his word, and, immediately after Boxing Day, she was hammering Labour for booming salaries in the Ministry of Education.
According to Rich, the number of staff in the ministry earning the highest salaries has increased fourfold in the past five years.
In July 2002, there were 13 Ministry of Education employees earning more than $130,000 a year; by July 2007, there were a whopping 46 big earners. Further down the ministry food chain it is the same, the number of staff earning $110,000-$120,000 has tripled to 41. Has anyone noticed the quality of our children's education quadrupling or even tripling over the past five years?
Similarly, National MP Simon Power stirred himself from his sun lounger to fire off an attack on the Department of Corrections for doubling the amount it spends on consultants to nearly $20 million of taxpayers' money a year.
This growth in consultancy is not because Corrections has downsized its permanent staff because the number of fulltimers grew by 11 per cent in the past year.
Anyone noticed that our Prison System was twice as good this year as last? Not really, when you consider Corrections blew its budget for four new jails by some $490 million.
Labour can try and dig up old scandals and hurl them at its opponents, but the Nats may prove the best way to discredit a party is by exposing its waste and stupidity.