Pundit

If I was David Lewis, former Pundit on this very site and now the communications king of Len Brown's Auckland mayoralty campaign, I'd be doing two things about now - giving my candidate a long lecture about discipline and organising the biggest enrolment drive in the city's history.

Isn't it curious how quickly we forget? Fourteen months ago today, police were exchanging shots with Jan Molenaar in Napier and sending LAVs up to his front door.

If you only caught the headlines from the weekend's G20 summit, you could be excused for thinking all is coming right with the global eocnomy.

What is the purpose of protest? It's one of the core questions to ask when we're debating the rights and wrongs of Russel Norman's waving the Tibetan flag at the Chinese vice-president Xi Jinping.

And that, my compatriots, is why sporting rights – and sports teams – have been central to Rupert Murdoch's success in building several television empires. A sit-com or drama can engross us, current affairs can change the way we think, but only sport is electric, as we saw in South Africa early this morning.

Those long summers of my childhood taught me to be careful of sharp rocks and rips when I was playing on the foreshore or being dumped by waves onto the seabed. National and the Maori Party are learning the same lesson at the moment, quite possibly at their electoral expense.

In America they talk of the third rail; an issue so charged that to touch it is certain death, politically. It can refer to a number of issues, but most commonly it 's used to describe social security.

Ploughing through the news of last week has led me to one inevitable conclusion, that New Zealanders just haven't been able to get their head around 'cause and effect'. Y'know, the idea that if you do A, then you're likely to get B.

In recent weeks, Phil Goff has been trying to argue that the National government deserves no credit for the upturn in the economy and growing employment; we're simply benefiting from a rebounding global economy. Of course that's the reverse of his argument during the recession, when National was solely to blame for the spike in unemployment and the world an innocent bystander.

The white on black headline and the giant pull quote made it look more like a British red-top tabloid than a quality broadsheet, but the Sunday Star Times' front page had an element of old-school journalism about it that would have impressed Tom Wolfe or even F. Scott Fitzgerald.