Farewell and good riddance to 2007, when politicians broke many of their own laws, rewrote others to wipe out past offences, but occasionally got caught and convicted, too. Farewell to a year of widespread silliness, where hardly a day passed without some new travesty or foul-up for us to complain about. Long may this stupidity continue, for if it ceases, so will GoG.

It’s time for our “That was the year that was” end-of-term report for the last six months (because we’ve only been going since July) before we declare “goodbye, cruel world” for a couple of weeks.

2007 highlights

That was the year when decent Kiwi parents were banned from smacking their children; one parent was convicted for doing so; murderous child abuse continued unabated.

That was the year when Labour minister and alleged tennis-ball-star schoolteacher David Benson-Pope had to admit to using some economy with the truth. He departed the scene, due to Setchell abuse. Trevor Mallard worked overtime to achieve an unassailable position as the nation’s prize pillock. We won’t bore you with Labour’s entire litany of sleaze and corruption, because it’s Christmas and there’s still some shopping to be done.

The Winstoncard was introduced, saving grey people the worry of deciding who to vote for next year, but not saving them anything else. Winston Peters tried to give his illegally spent, taxpayer-funded election gains to a child cancer hospital, but only succeeded in making young and old consider him an unpleasant stuntman.

Flaky and uncontrolled finance companies fell like a house of credit cards, and the Greens’ “buy New Zealand” campaign looked equally sick when a raft of manufacturers sent their production to China. Labour refused to properly control finance companies or loan sharks.

The Greens, who number less than the fingers of one hand in Parliament and are virtually invisible in terms of electoral support, absurdly suggested obesity “traffic light” warnings on food labelling, but failed to even get “country of origin” labelling past Labour. Voters, particularly those in gridlocked Auckland, concluded that voting Green means: “We’re going nowhere”.

Ahmed Zaoui was finally freed from our version of Guantanamo Bay. By year-end, Helen Clark had still been unable to explain either the reasons for his imprisonment or the costs. No other party uttered one single important word about this abuse of human rights.

In sport, we lost everything – including our most promising rugby coach, who joins the 40,000-plus a year leaving for Australia. Capping a calamitous sporting year, Minister Damian O’Connor was spotted seriously offside for playing rugby with an allegedly dodgy prison officer in Paris, and sent off. Other Labour thugs beat up whistle-blowers and slandered public servants, some of whom either lost their jobs or resigned.

It was a very bad year for the police.

Maoris stole corpses from their rightful relatives, buried the remains on the North Island’s East Coast and refused to give them back. They drowned one of their own “accursed” during an exorcism. Policemen sat around for a long time, considering all sorts of primitive cultural issues, perhaps hoping they would go away. In the meantime, and for several days, other cops overlooked the remains of a Chinese murder victim lying in the boot of her own car, parked outside her Auckland home.

Police mounted a 300-strong assault on a non-existent group of “terrorists”. In doing so, they wrecked whatever weak recovery had been made in Maori-Pakeha relations, had their evidence binned by the Solicitor-General, offered to (but did not) say sorry to people they had threatened with machine-guns, and were left with a few feeble firearms charges to pursue. The New Zealand media proved incapable of reporting the issue in a balanced way.

Policeman Clint Rickards became a hate figure, leaving the force with an undisclosed fortune, so long as he doesn’t disclose anything. A cynical public became 98 percent disgusted with the police, 99 percent bored with Louise Nicholas and 100 percent fed up with the Dominion Post.

Labour and its toadies passed the Electoral Finance Bill, completely unaware that voters know full well that they – and not the Exclusive Brethren or fat-cats – are being stitched up. This will go down as the longest suicide note in the country’s political history.

The economy grew by sod-all and house prices sank, while boring Dr Bollard applied the screws, put house ownership further beyond the reach of youngsters and groaned on and on about non-existent inflationary threats. Our only astronomical observatory sacked 80 percent of the staff, so we can’t even look towards the heavens for help.

We end the year with the health service in crisis, despite endless amounts of extra money and bureaucracy, in an apparently ungovernable country where Maori academic achievement is barely better than it was in 1969 and most parents remain unconvinced about NCEA; a place where boy racers deafen and terrorise neighbourhoods and defy the police; where violence is endemic; where it’s thought acceptable to bribe mothers to leave hospital early (or bribe the midwives); and where many people no longer wish to continue their never-to-be-repeated lives here, opting for somewhere else where the money and the weather are better.

That’s just a short selection of the huge range of nonsense that a tiny nation, hanging off the far end of the Earth, has managed to generate in just six short months, and with so little genuine social progress.

So roll on 2008, which promises to be another rough-and-tumble year. Citizens are outraged by the Electoral Finance Act. The Sensible Sentencing Trust and individuals - even entire cities - may go out and break bad law. It’s also virtually certain that politicians will continue to waste our money and bend their own rules, or bring in new and even more lunatic ones to plague us.

Roll on the new Government fleet of Kyoto-defying, gas-guzzling BMWs at $170,000 each; how can anyone now take Labour’s “green” propaganda seriously? Roll on mean-spirited tax cuts, to be balanced by interest rate rises. This way, the money Labour would have wasted is instead privatised and sent to foreign-owned banks, who will take the profit to Australia or Singapore, or London.

Roll on February, when Winston Peters makes that momentous decision about which charity he’ll donate our misspent tax money to (if he can find anyone daft enough to accept it), and watch as further public outrage ensues.

Roll on that long hot summer, when everyone will worry even more about global warming, or moan about the torrential rain and icy winds that ruined their holidays.

Roll on the election, when we might just throw out all those tired old faces, and find a new set of mugs to groan about.

But, in the meantime, it’s the season of goodwill, not grumpiness, so we’ll take a short break and be back in the New Year. Thanks for reading. We wish you a happy, safe and peaceful holiday.