KEY POINTS:
John Key has taken his funny pills but it takes Winston Peters to show how it's done.
In his reply to the Prime Minister's statement to Parliament, Mr Key compared Labour to a gramophone - "confined to history, a relic left gathering dust at the back of the
cupboard wondering why the music has stopped".
He described Helen Clark's speech as "vacuous" and "boring" and joked about Shane Jones mounting a leadership bid in a third of the time it has taken for Labour to offer tax cuts.
He claimed the Resource Management Act would mean: "I have more chance of being Britney Spears' therapist in 2015 than of driving through the Waterview tunnel ... "
Mr Key finishes and Mr Peters stands and waits for the Nats to stop clapping.
He doesn't waste his breath outlining his own policy. Everyone knows his policy on this particular day is to put on his own oratorical Punch & Judy Show, with the National Party cast as the unfortunate Judy. Nobody upstages Winston Peters.
He begins poetically - a narrator hooking an audience - with "furrowed brows in the dusty roads of countryside New Zealand, in the cowsheds, and woolshed and shearing sheds and the export works".
When even the Prime Minister has abandoned her paperwork to listen, he rewards her by making his victim clear - the National Party.
Just where, he asks, was there mention of how Mr Key would make sick people better; make the roads flow better; stop people moving to Australia or speed up broadband. Of foreign ownership and Auckland Airport there was "not a word, not a whisper, not a mutter, not a murmur". Why was there silence on what Mr Key would do for interest rates or changing the Reserve Bank Act? "Not a word about that. Not a murmur."
He turns to crime. "I'll tell you what the National Party tough love policy on crime is," he says, "I've got a photo of it". He pulls out an enlarged newspaper photo of Tame Iti - currently facing firearms charges - greeting Mr Key with a hongi at Waitangi.
"That's real tough love," Mr Peters says. "With a criminal facing serious charges."
With Mr Key done and dusted, Mr Peters is momentarily side-tracked by the media in the Press Gallery above him. The gallery reporters are first Mr Key's "floozies and doozies" and then generalised "dumbos" for not knowing the definition of a "bauble' - 'a trinket, something not worth having' - "and which part of my job is like a trinket and not worth having?"
This sets both sides of the House into a frenzy of glee. Helen Clark is holding her hands in her lap to resist the impulse to punch a fist in the air. Annette King doesn't bother hiding her delight.
Then Mr Peters moves on to another favourite sport - Bob-baiting. He eyeballs Bob Clarkson, the National MP who took his coveted Tauranga seat from him in 2005. "Bob's not a builder. He's a property developer, a speculator," Mr Peters declares as Mr Clarkson goes red.
There are appreciative roars from Labour.
"Are you going to stand, Bob?" Mr Peters asks, despite Mr Clarkson already having announced he was. "He was bluffing on about 'if Winston stands I'm going to stand'. Well, only a fool tests the water with both feet, Bob."
Finally the vaudeville is over. As he takes his seat you can almost hear him triumphantly call the Punch catch-cry: "That's the way to do it!"
* KEY DISMISSIVE OF 'VACUOUS' SPEECH
National leader John Key dismissed the Prime Minister's opening statement to Parliament yesterday as "a bunch of vacuous statements" and recycled policies.
Mr Key said Helen Clark's statement was simply a litany of problems her Government had not fixed despite nine years of power.
He said her speech was an opportunity to be "visionary".
"Instead she gave us her version of sustainability and recycled a bunch of tired, old, previously announced policies ... there were no solutions, just a bunch of committees and a bunch of things she could look at."
Mr Key reserved his harshest criticism for Labour's Finance Minister Michael Cullen, saying people were struggling to pay for petrol, mortgages, rent, and school donations but Labour had waited nine years to offer tax cuts.
He said Dr Cullen's four tests as a precondition for tax cuts were "bogus".
"The four tests for tax cuts are actually to make it look principled but actually there is only one test. Is it election year and how far behind are they in the polls?"
He criticised the Government's economic record as "a story of lost opportunities" and said the Prime Minister promised in 2001 that Labour would get New Zealand into the top half of the OECD by 2011.
Interest rates had gone from 4.5 per cent in 1999 to 8.25 per cent under Labour and 800 people a week were moving to Australia.
"We are going down the OECD, not up ... the way the Labour Government will be judged is not by the rhetoric of Helen Clark. She will be judged by her record."
Mr Key said National would offer tax cuts "year after year" and improve productivity by investing in infrastructure, cutting red tape and reforming the Resource Management Act.
He also promoted his newly announced youth crime policies and free education or training for all 16- and 17-year-olds.