KEY POINTS:
For Cabinet minister Trevor Mallard 2007 was the year of getting lean and mean.
The political veteran was frequently sighted heading in and out of the Beehive carpark on early morning cycle jaunts that clearly reduced his waistline.
But while his figure slimmed the self-styled hardman's reputation for
knee capping his political opponents ballooned.
Mr Mallard's streetfighting credibility spiked in October when he dusted up Tau Henare in Parliament's lobbies, after the National MP taunted him about a woman believed to be his new partner.
Mr Mallard tried to tell him he had the wrong woman, but in the end it was his fists that talked the loudest and the two had to be pulled off one another.
Mr Henare accepted an apology from Mr Mallard, but Wellington accountant Graham McCready decided he should pay a higher price and launched a private assault prosecution against him.
The fight cost Mr Mallard his prized sport and Rugby World Cup portfolios and he was moved in to the environment portfolio instead.
But that new job landed him in similar trouble when he launched a verbal attack on Environment Ministry whistleblower Erin Leigh, labelling her as "sad" and incompetent in a tirade under the protection parliamentary privilege.
Mr Mallard's opponents accused him of trying to smear and bully the Government's critics.
A week before Christmas Mr Mallard moved to put and end to his parliamentary version of the Sopranos, by pleading guilty to a lesser charge of fighting in a public place and apologising to Ms Leigh.
The environment portfolio also proved a quagmire for Mr Mallard's predecessor David Benson-Pope.
After weeks of denying he had played any part in the removal of Madeleine Setchell as the ministry's head of communications - due to her partner Kevin Taylor being National leader John Key's press secretary - Mr Benson-Pope admitted he had not told the whole truth.
The 11th-hour admission cost him his job and leaves him with a fight on his hands to retain Labour's candidacy in Dunedin South.
But Government ministers were not the only ones to shoot themselves in the foot.
National leader John Key even appeared at one point to forget which party he belonged to.
In a tub-thumping speech to National's annual conference Mr Key said: "Under a Labour government I lead child abusers will be severely punished".
Mr Key quickly recovered from the embarrassing slip of the tongue, but struck further turbulence later in the year when talking about National's stance on the Iraq war.
"Frankly the war in Iraq is over," he unilaterally declared in an interview on Radio New Zealand.
Green MP Keith Locke sarcastically suggested Mr Key should phone United States President George W Bush to tell him the "good news".
"Until Mr Key put me wise I had assumed the US and its coalition allies were bogged down fighting an intractable insurgency in Iraq that had seen a surge in US troop numbers earlier this year," Mr Locke said.
Mr Key ran into further trouble when National put out about 20,000 DVDs promoting the leader to voters.
Mr Key likes listening to Coldplay, but unfortunately a short segment of music on the disc, that sounded like the British rock band's 2004 hit Clocks, was not the real thing.
Amid accusations of plagiarism and piracy the party was forced to recall the discs.
Another National MP to unwittingly pop up in the headlines was former diplomat Tim Groser.
Mr Groser has represented New Zealand at the highest levels in international trade circles, but was forced to publicly admit that earlier in life he had got high on marijuana as well as diplomacy.
His party colleague Jacqui Dean was one of those calling for the Government to radically toughen its stance on drugs.
Not content with campaigning against party pills, Ms Dean wrote to Associate Health Minister Jim Anderton asking if his officials had a view on banning water.
The Otago MP had fallen victim to a long-running hoax that sought to trick gullible MPs into calling for a ban on "dihydrogen monoxide" - or water as it's more commonly known.
Mr Anderton took the opportunity to highlight the embarrassing blunder.
"Dihydrogen monoxide may have been described to her as colourless, odourless, tasteless and causing the death of uncounted thousands of people every year, and withdrawal from which, for those who become dependent on it, means certain death."
But the minister said he had no intention of banning it.
One MP who has probably never smoked dope or taken party pills is former United Future MP Gordon Copeland.
Nevertheless the newly independent Christian MP appeared dazed and confused for most of the year.
Mr Copeland split from United Future over its decision to allow a conscience vote on Green MP Sue Bradford's so-called "anti-smacking bill".
But he then undercut his raison d'etre by failing to turn up to vote against the bill's final reading.
When phoned by the Dominion Post and told MPs had already taken the crucial vote, Mr Copeland gave this memorable response: "Oh shucks, have they? (Whistles) Wow."
The confusion continued when Mr Copeland was involved in a bid to put together a united Christian party, but then reneged after becoming miffed that former Destiny leader Richard Lewis was announced as his co-leader ahead of schedule.
The independent MP also struggled with words at times - sending out Christmas cards describing himself as an independant (sic) MP.
But Mr Copeland was not alone in his struggles with the english language.
Education Minister Chris Carter had school teachers around the country wincing when he sent an email to 16-year-old election finance reform opponent Simeon Brown littered with spelling and grammatical errors.
Mr Carter misspelled Simeon as Simon, missed out question marks and fullstops, spelt elsewhere as two words, wrote "your" instead of "you're" and put the e after u in argument.
- NZPA
