Insults fly thick and fast in bout of gleeful mud-slinging

Phil Goff. Photo / Sarah Ivey

It's hard to get mud to stick when you're throwing it from the valley floor and your target is standing on a mountain summit.

Given plenty of ammunition - employment law changes and the Government's complete backdown on mining in protected conservation land - Phil Goff gleefully took aim at John Key in the House yesterday.

What was going to bring wealth and glory to New Zealand, he asked.

Mining in national parks, the Job Summit, the 2025 task force, Chinese investment in broadband, or New Zealand as a world centre for financial services? "And what cloud is he going to jump to next?" Goff added to riotous applause from his caucus colleagues.

But the view from the top is not so easily obstructed and Key let the claps subside before he retorted: "I can't be sure whether I'm on a cloud, but I know that the Leader of the Opposition is in a hole, from the latest polls we've seen.

"Talking of digging things up, the only place he'll be safe is in a pristine national park, because that's the only place where he can't dig a hole for himself."

Exchanges continued as Labour challenged Key on his claim that bosses still have to give a reason to workers they are firing under the 90-day trial scheme.

Labour shouts drowned Key out as he started his response. The Prime Minister usually just keeps talking, but this was a particularly rowdy day and he waited with the look of a deprived child at the fair, prompting Darren Hughes to fill the creeping silence with a cry of: "Awww, it's not fair."

Key returned fire by complimenting Hughes' haircut, and when the already slightly rosy Hughes turned a shade closer to ripe tomato, he added: "Don't blush, Dazza."

Labour was undeterred and, when Key stood up to give his next reply, they bombarded him with more taunts.

"Well, you can hear the answer if you want, but if you don't, I won't bother," said Key, sitting again as Grant Robertson threw his arms in the air amid his own cries of "tossing toys".

But Labour was always going to struggle to score points, especially as their union supporters had shown particularly astute judgment at the protest last weekend by storming the wrong building.

"What does it say ... when these veteran protesters from the 1970s couldn't even find the right building in which to finally start their long-hoped-for class war?" Rodney Hide asked.

"I suspect if they're not good at navigation, they shouldn't give up their jobs as serial protesters and become taxi drivers,'cause they won't last the 90 days."

By the time it was Kate Wilkinson's turn to trumpet the 90-day trial, Labour had become far more subdued, though it remains unclear whether they had run out of juice, or whether they thought their collective volume might reduce the slightly built minister to mere wisps of smoke.