Some of these are evidently inherited, or long-term structural issues, but unemployment is up, prison numbers seem to be going one way only, living costs are rising, inflation is expected to surge in the next year and the country is enduring a prolonged period of economic lethargy.
Usually any serious consideration of "fault" escapes the average voter and the government of the day is blamed for the state of affairs, regardless. So how to explain the gulf between everyday reality for many New Zealanders and the seemingly unassailable poll ratings of Mr Key and his colleagues? Why is it that he and his party can do no serious - that is to say, electorally damaging - wrong? Or to put it another way, why is there such a disconnect between the general public and the opposition Labour Party?
Despite the consternation caused this week by his outburst suggesting the Labour Party's list has come to be dominated by "self-serving unionists" and a "gaggle of gays", Labour list MP, former minister and West Coast-Tasman MP Damien O'Connor may yet have done his party a service.
As much as it does not need yet another distraction from the business of holding the Government to account - as successful opposition parties must do - the party cannot pretend it has made up ground since its last election defeat despite every opportunity to do so, and it should seriously question why.
Policy renewal is an exercise all parties must carry out from time to time, but opposition parties are constrained - particularly in election year - by the need to release these strategically and to greatest effect. So only in broad terms is the party likely to make much headway - or capture the public imagination - between now and the election campaign proper with policy pronouncements. It can adjust its "personality" mix in an attempt to make itself more electable and it might be said this is precisely what the Party List, released this week, is intended to do.
But, and this is where Mr O'Connor's forthright remarks come in, what does its publication this week do to change the perception of the party among the wider New Zealand electorate? If Mr O'Connor is correct, very little.
With its perceived bias towards a combination of urban liberals and unionists, there is not much in the list to persuade middle New Zealand that this is a different party from that which lost the last election.
This perception, and that of the list being "massaged" to meet certain agendas, was not assuaged by the selection of Louisa Wall to replace Darren Hughes in Parliament - in place of five other members ahead of her.
Mr O'Connor is standing in West Coast-Tasman, an electorate out of which the Labour movement in New Zealand emerged, but which has in the intervening decades assumed a socially conservative, hard-done-by electoral demeanour - one not immediately sympathetic to the urban liberal, environmentally-friendly tranches of the Labour Party in the northern cities.
This disjuncture has seen Mr O'Connor at odds with his own party before - most notably when the Labour-led administration eviscerated the logging industry on the West Coast a decade or so ago.
He has removed himself from what he considers an unsatisfactory list selection process, and will stand as an electorate MP only.
His remarks this week will have done his own prospects of re-election little harm. But they may also have struck a chord with heartland voters throughout the country - and in the more populous urban seats where voters are not necessarily union supporters and are concerned about where the family's next meal is coming from rather than whether the party has delivered a list of candidates with the requisite array of gender, ethnic, union and sexual orientations.
Mr Goff and the rest of his caucus might be offended by the comments, and Mr O'Connor might have apologised for them, but when the party has finished with its politically correct scolding and posturing, it might like to put a collective ear to the ground: there it might hear the reverberations of disenfranchised former Labour voters cheering.
