Barry Soper: No party covers itself in glory as parliamentary year draws to a close

COMMENT: As the parliamentary year draws to a close neither of the two main parties has covered itself in glory - with even Speaker Trevor Mallard realising, after a short pause and a lot of guffawing, that he had to play fair.

Most of the country by now would have been happy to have heard the last of Czech drug smuggler Karel Sroubek.

But National wasn't prepared to let it go and for weeks has been banging on in Parliament about it, cajoling Winston Peters, who was standing in for the Prime Minister, to indicate Sroubek's wife was a National Party nark.

Out of nowhere they release a tape from the wife being verbally abused by Sroubek, essentially confirming what Peters had said. The recorded tape was released to them from his estranged wife.

National knew from the outset that Sroubek had made the threatening call from prison. And of course they knew there'd be a tape recording of it.

And on another, unrelated, issue the most transparent Government ever (promised Jacinda Ardern) hasn't lived up to her proclamation over the infernal United Nations Migration Compact, and is still refusing to tell us whether we're going to vote for it.

There's been so little from the Government about the compact - and as a consequence the great unwashed have been left wondering whether this is going to be the end of our border controls as we know them. They will have seen the riots in the streets of the normally peaceful European capital of Brussels.

Naysayers have been telling us we'll be losing our sovereignty and that the media will be muzzled. Of course none of it is true for this country at the bottom of the world - and besides, the compact's non-binding, which is usually the case with resolutions from the great, amorphous United Nations.

As David Lange once said at the height of our anti-nuclear stand, it's easy for us, we're not looking down the barrel of a gun, we don't have nuclear warheads trained on us.

So in a way the compact's this country's new nuclear-free moment and when the power on the throne, Winston Peters, arrives back in the country from Washington today, he'll announce our support of it.

And the man who's been accused of being the Prime Minister's supporter, well her protector in Parliament, Speaker Trevor Mallard, had little choice but to protect Simon Bridges, who he threw out of the bear pit for making the accusation.

The place became raucous after Jacinda Ardern referred to the National leader as simple Simon. She was forced by her buddy Mallard to stand, withdraw the comment and apologise for making it.

All MPs are referred to as 'honourable' - which in many cases is debatable.