John Armstrong

So it's goodbye Mr Smile and Wave, and hello Mr Grumpy. Or so the Prime Minister's critics would have you believe.

National's "mixed ownership model" - the innocuous-sounding vehicle tasked with making the party's unpopular privatisation agenda more appetising - paradoxically may yet end up making the partial sell-offs of state corporations even less palatable to voters.

Some elements on the left of the political spectrum have long cried wolf about National supposedly having a secret agenda, especially when it comes to privatisation.

New Zealand Herald political columnist John Armstrong lays out the reasons for National's victory in the general election.

Has John Key completely lost the plot? The Prime Minister's statement yesterday that National's success in cutting the crime rate has given police spare time to pursue his complaint about the secret taping of his conversation with John Banks sounds astonishingly naive, but is also deeply disturbing.

John Key insists there is nothing on the secret tape of his "cup of tea'' conversation with John Banks to cause him the slightest bother.

Act is now trying to sell itself as the "right'' partner for National. The party is trying to sell Don Brash's Reserve Bank experience as "right'' for tough economic times.

Tough on welfare? National might want voters to think that. But the party's latest move on welfare reform is also carefully framed to make some of the claims from National's critics that the package bullies and punishes beneficiaries sound rather shrill.

No matter how much in the way of cosmetics National applies to pretty up its plan to sell shares in some state assets, the policy is never going to be popular. John Key is doing his darnedest to make it so, however.

Borrow and hope; tax and spend. For months, that has been Bill English's pithy, double-phrased encapsulation of how Labour would run the economy.