KEY POINTS:
It was chaos on the streets on Friday morning. At least that is what the TV and radio reporters assured me. I was tucked up in bed still reading the paper and keeping an ear on the broadcasts about the truckies' protest.
Sadly, the pictures showed "chaos" was a somewhat sedate line of trucks rolling along the roads, happily tooting and waving at cheerful pedestrians, many of whom waved back.
If you wanted to see chaos last week it was not the convoy of trucks chugging up Molesworth St past Parliament, it was the whirling frenzy of ministers and advisers in the upper floors of the Beehive.
The Government reminds me of a driver who has dozed off at the wheel, then jerked awake to find the lorry hurtling towards a cliff. There has been a sudden frenetic burst of activity with the wheel being wrenched side to side, the handbrake dragged on, and smoke coming off the tyres as someone simultaneously puts their feet on the brake pedal and the accelerator.
After nine years of promises, shared equity housing plans burst into bloom, just as the property market crashes, neatly downsizing the amount of equity likely to remain in any home bought under the scheme.
Social Development Minister Ruth Dyson suddenly discovers child poverty and the fact that people have been hard-hit by inflation, rising prices and fuel costs and so doubles the emergency food benefit available to hard-pressed families.
Finally, realising tax cuts don't help beneficiaries because they don't earn an income, the other part of her strategy to help the poor is to announce a single benefit structure and remove nasty pejorative phrases like "DPB" and "invalid" from the social welfare lexicon of benefits.
I am sure that must somehow stretch beneficiaries' food budgets even further.
Associate Arts Minister Judith Tizard awoke from her near-decade-long slumber to deliver authors a special Government fund to reimburse writers for all the cheapskates who simply read books in libraries.
After many horrific news reports of school bullying, Education Minister Chris Carter decides to hand out cards to all schoolchildren warning them that bullying is bad.
So, in future, when your kid is getting beaten up for his lunch money he can pull out the card and wave off his attackers, like a vampire hunter wielding a cross and garlic.
Labour pumps an entire new university campus into its fertile voting ground of South Auckland.
It buys back the less-than-originally named KiwiRail, at the same time managing to spike its new transport rivals, the road transport industry, with punitive road taxes.
Meanwhile, in the House, there was the highly unusual sight of Helen Clark warmly embracing the journalism of activist Nicky Hager.
On previous occasions, such as his Seeds of Mistrust story on genetic modification, his articles on the activities of New Zealand spy bases, and the downright wrong story alleging SIS spies had infiltrated the Maori Party, Clark would have cheerfully driven a stake through his heart.
However, this time Hager claimed National was using an Australian firm of political strategists. The Aussies' biggest sin, it seems, was helping John Howard get re-elected several times and, in 1995, it was supposed to have asked a dubious question of some respondents in a "push poll".
Neatly overlooking the fact that getting Howard re-elected happened to be the job that Crosby/Textor was paid to do (and it seemed to do so very effectively), that Labour has its own hired guns, and the Labour Party's pollsters also do "push polling", Clark warmly embraced the Hager story as damning, irrefutable fact.
As far as the media was concerned, National's offence was that it kept the names of its consultants secret. Journalists hate secrets. For his part John Key argued that he could not name his advisers because New Zealand was a small country, some of the people he consulted did other work for Government departments and, if the Labour Government found out, those people would "never work in this town again".
Can anyone seriously believe Helen Clark and this Government would be so petty and vindictive as to punish people for working with National? Oh. All right. Dumb question.
The point is, the public did not seem to give a damn about the allegations. At this stage of the game I doubt there is anything the Government could do to impress the public.
Clark and her ministers are looking increasing feral and rabid, especially after her slanderous and false attack under the protection of parliamentary privilege on Key for supposed insider trading.
Key, on the other hand is looking cool under pressure, maintaining his slightly bemused grin and resisting the temptation to go ballistic. He seems to think remaining positive and upbeat is what the voters want. He may be right.
