Beware false prophets, and wise men bearing gifts - or women, for that matter, since there are many these days in the ranks of our politicians, and to date there has been no indication that a propensity to gild the electoral lily is gender-biased.
It is, of course, election year and so there will be quite a shower, if not a deluge of promises and policies - a significant proportion of which will bear little resemblance to what is practical or feasible.
But with the appropriate degree of dressing up, and without the required degree of skepticism, many will seem to make sense.
Although the election date has yet to be announced - by most reckonings that is likely to be five to six months hence in late October or early November - already the air is thick with "sweeteners" and the scent of political parties on the make.
Thus it was with the announcement, by National Party leader John Key at the party's Canterbury-Westland regional conference last weekend, of the intention to crack down on gangs.
As election gambits go, this is the oldest in the book.
There is no realm quite so pregnant with possibilities for electoral advantage than crime.
And gang crime scores more highly than most.
Link it to the destructive trade in drugs, and in particular to today's special bete noir, "P", and you are on to a winner.
"Today I'm sending a warning to every single P dealer, every P manufacturer and every gang involved in the P trade: National will not put up with your criminal activity," Mr Key said.
Fine sentiments and ones with which the average voter could have no possible cause for disagreement.
We all want to see the back of P and if we could rid ourselves of the gangs at the same time - particularly those that make it their business to purvey destructive and anti-social drugs - then so much the better.
But for those of us old enough to recall, precisely the same promises on gangs have been made now for generations: the drug of choice may have changed, but the scourge has been the same, from Norman Kirk and Sir Robert Muldoon onwards.
They were all going to deal to the gangs.
If there was any true correlation between rhetoric and reality, gangs would have been disappeared from these shores several times over in the last few decades.
The problem with touchstone issues such as crime is that in the extravagance of their stated intentions the major parties end up attempting to outbid each other in the "toughness" stakes - to the detriment of coherent cross-party consensus and policy.
Crime and punishment are complex but highly emotive matters - all the more reason for policy not to be made on the hoof during an election build-up.
National is far from being alone in its enthusiastic embrace of the improbable.
The airing of "immigration" in election year is as predictable as a bloom of daffodils in the spring.
New Zealand First takes a special interest - some might say unhealthy interest - in this issue and it may be recalled that deputy leader Peter Brown has already signalled, with his somewhat incautious remarks on Asian population growth in April, that this election will be no different.
It is not that immigration is an unimportant issue.
Nor that he should be discouraged from raising it.
Like crime, it is of critical import, but like crime it is also easily held hostage to volatile emotion rather than rational debate - and therein lies the risk of it being trivialised.
Mantras already emanating from the Labour corner to the effect that the National Party will cut benefits and slash social spending to fund tax cuts, and will embark on a programme of state asset sales, amply indicate that National and NZ First do not have a monopoly on the trite and the simplistic.
In an election year all parties will to do their best, and their worst, to differentiate themselves and their policies to advantage.
A degree of hyperbole is to be expected.
That is politics, as they say.
But that does not mean the electorate, and those charged with interrogating the motives and methods of our political masters, should sit back and lap it up.
On the contrary.
There will be gifts galore - beginning with the budget this week - and promises to burn, in the coming months.
Such entreaties should be entertained with a degree of distance and dollops of informed skepticism
