OPINION: Pity the poor political junkie whos developed a twitch from worrying about missing a news bulletin.

Keep up junkie, cancel all lunches and coffee dates. Your job is to remain by the radio and be alert at all times to the latest whiff of a political scandal.

The name of this game is speed chess, as pawns, knights, bishops and kings take a tumble, and queens do their best to stay out of harms way.

Stuff

While Queen Jacinda prefers to stay on the ground, Queen Judith likes to fly low over Parliament, writes Jane Bowron.

Judith Collins likes to lay her traps feeding patsy questions to a host on her happy place, the AM breakfast show.

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Collins breached the rules of leader engagement by putting it out there she got mail from a third party pertaining to a Labour ministers conduct, pre-empting the announcement of her opposite.

Queen Judith likes to wear her World War II helmet and fly low over Parliament to show off her latest kill markings on the side of her plane.

Queen Jacinda prefers to stay on the ground making noble speeches to the troops about why it is a far, far better thing she does now in sacking a knight, whos had illegal nights with one of his underlings.

Kevin Stent/Stuff

Jane Bowron: We become blas about our hard won and precarious sealed-off freedom in our tyranny of isolation as the corona rages the rest of the world.

Politicians, parliamentary public servants, and gallery journalists anxiously trawl back through their memory banks, thanking their lucky stars that a compulsory Canoodle Tracing app wasnt around the last time they lay across enemy lines and touched forbidden fruit.

How will this all end? Perhaps a meeting will be arranged between the two leaders where it is agreed that in the interests of the country and the need for a good clean fight, there will be an exchange of files. Each queen will bring her smut dossier to the meeting, agree to stop extra-marital affair banking, and promise to play nice.

Meanwhile, cabinet ministers grow tired and irritable from the additional portfolios they are suddenly over-burdened with. Like school students listing to one side with heavy cases of text books, they struggle the corridors of power trying to dodge media to get to their offices and resume work.

The electorates memory is shattered by scandals, but some of them vaguely remember a kindly doctor whose every word they hung on as he relayed to them the daily numbers of a pandemic. Sometimes they catch sight of him lodged way down in the news list, and blush at the memory of a crush.

Monique Ford/Stuff

Remember the kindly doctor, whose every word was hung on as he relayed the daily number of the pandemic.

In olden days, New Zealanders would watch the international news and feel embarrassed at how far behind and backward we were compared to the rest of the sophisticated world. Ten years behind in clothes and culture we would try to wrangle jeans and LPs from the vaguest of overseas contacts in order to appear hip.

Now we watch the news and see those countries we once revered going back into lockdown, and recoil in horror at peacefully protesting cities being quelled by fascist forces. Meanwhile we are spoilt for freedoms of choice pondering cannabis legislation and control, and end-of-life choice referendums.

Various tsk tsk noises are made about an urgent need for a parliamentary conduct of code to avoid moral collapse in the highest echelons, while Team 5 Million lose sight of our code of conduct over the virus.

We become blas about our hard won and precarious sealed-off freedom in our tyranny of isolation as the corona rages the rest of the world. Numbed by our privileged new normal, we barely register pride when a news bulletin tells us we have the lowest death rate from Covid-19 in the developed world, and theres been no evidence of the virus in the community for over 28 days.

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NZ has become 'too blas' about its hard-won freedom from Covid - Stuff.co.nz