Week in politics

Tax cuts in the good times; even bigger tax cuts in the not so good times.

Prime Minister John Key might seem a winner, but let's look at the rest of the field.

How on earth did that happen? If they haven't already conducted a postmortem, National's strategists might well ask themselves how Labour managed to set the political agenda so easily this week on the crucial question of how to preserve jobs in the current economic recession.

Bill English's Budget may have paved the first few kilometres on what he has called the "road to recovery".

The unwelcome ghosts of austere budgets past loom large and linger ominously in the dank, though slightly lightening economic gloom. The Prime Minister accordingly has set in train the necessary rites of exorcism.

The optimistic Prime Minister John Key is being unusually downbeat about National's prospects in the Mt Albert by-election.

Much has been made of the "mana enhancing relationship" National and the Maori Party have enshrined in their relationship.

So the National Government is variously inching, shifting, drifting, veering or lurching to the Right, depending on where you stand on the political spectrum.