John Armstrong

The Year of the Tiger? As far as the New Zealand Parliament goes, 2010 might be better remembered as the Year of the Lemming.

Within the deep recesses of the Labour Party and elsewhere on the left, there is a lingering arrogance saturated with an intellectual snobbery which both blinds and deludes its sufferers.

It goes without saying that any independently written dossier highlighting which MPs are successfully clawing their way up politics' greasy pole and which are firmly on the slide is essential reading for Parliament's ambition-crazed inhabitants.

It is inevitable as the sun rises that politics will barge its way through the door soon enough and jolt the nation out of its temporarily dazed state of unity in adversity, while simultaneously blithely ignoring the very private and much deeper grief of the families of the 29 miners killed in the Pike River Coal tragedy.

The joke doing the rounds of the military has it that there seems to be no spare cash for anything other than hiring expensive consultants to squeeze more money out of the Defence Force's budget to hire even more expensive consultants ...

Far be it that a British immigrant of Anglo-Saxon lineage who has never got around to taking out New Zealand citizenship should lecture a Maori Party MP on the dos and don'ts of politics.

Brittle, uncertain, and full of surprises. No, that is not an assessment of former Labour Party MP Chris Carter's current state of mind.

Damned if he does; dog tucker if he doesn't. Phil Goff's promise to remove GST from fresh fruit and vegetables might be interpreted as a sign Labour has gone completely gaga.

Doomed, kaput, done for, dead and buried: Act New Zealand has been written-off more times than your typical boy-racer's standard low-slung 2-litre turbo-charged pride and joy.

This is a climate which does not look kindly at penny-pinching by the state. The Prime Minister would be less than human if he wasn't disappointed at having to cancel his weekend engagement as the Queen's guest at Balmoral Castle, the royal family's residence in Scotland.

An announcement from the Vatican is surely due any day now such is Timaru's relentless beatification of Allan Hubbard, a man supposedly so broke he can still apparently afford the top-dollar advice of a top-flight Wellington public relations company.

Simon Power will surely be disappointed by the public's less-than-ecstatic reaction to his proposals for tackling the harm caused by heavy drinking.

So Rodney Hide ended the most calamitous week in his party's history having won (at least for the time being) the debilitating power struggle that has been consuming the Act New Zealand caucus and the wider party for months.

The extraordinary and highly damaging revelations contained in Heather Roy's 82-page statement of defence prepared for last Tuesday's showdown over Act's deputy leadership raise serious questions about Rodney Hide remaining as leader.

There it sits, a very large and seemingly very juicy statistic buried in the back pages of this week's discussion paper on welfare reform; a figure which screams for attention as indisputable evidence that the present benefit system must get the chop or, at a minimum, serious restructuring.

Shame on National. That party's behaviour in Parliament over the past couple of weeks has on occasion veered close to being a disgrace, both to itself and the institution.

Can Phil Goff shrug off Chris Carter's very public and very damaging charge that Labour's current leader cannot win next year's election and should be replaced as soon as possible? The short answer is not without some difficulty.