Rachel Glucina: Battle of babes and the wolf

Spare a thought for Jacinda Ardern. Her boss Phil Goff is so desperate to get her into bed, so to speak, he's prepared to splurge $1.2 billion. He says Labour would fork out that much for the Auckland rail loop. But this is just a clever way of getting around the funding rules and pumping money into the Battle of the Babes in Auckland Central.

Meanwhile, there was a flurry of speculation this week about the whereabouts of Don Brash's mojo - just returned from a gallivanting trip abroad, it then went berserk in front of a TV camera. Brash decided to use the Winston Peters method of dealing with the media. When approached by Paddy Gower of 3News to talk about the economy, specifically raising the age of entitlement for National Super and compulsory super, Brash said he wasn't going to answer Paddy's questions because he is a "deceitful bastard".

Now as far as we know, Paddy's parents were married when they had him. Perhaps Dr Brash hasn't caught up with modern childbearing matters, or perhaps the campaign is a bit wearying for him. Maybe he hadn't had his afternoon kip.

A post on David Farrar's Kiwiblog by someone bizarrely calling himself "Courage Wolf" - purporting to be Brash himself - retorted defensively: "[Gower] tried hard to get me to talk about a range of issues which were quite irrelevant to my purpose in being at the Deloitte-Business NZ conference ... I don't often lose my temper, and I don't often swear, but I was pushed too far."

Courage Wolf? I mean, really?