The media still don't seem to quite understand the relationship between the current government parties.

The media portray a centrist National party, being pulled to the right by ACT, United Future doing nothing in the middle, and the Maori Party as being out of the left in a strange temporary agreement where compromise will always be necessary.

Yes, ACT is on the right, and disagrees with National on quite a few issues. That part is probably quite well understood.

United Future may well be very small, but anyone that actually takes the time to read their policies will find they're a lot closer to ACT than to National. It is United Future's confidence and supply agreement that pushes for lowering and flattening of tax rates. ACT instead lays out the goal of catching Australia (although that will require tax cuts too, of course). United Future are also quite happy to call for more use of the private sector in the health system.

The problems with the media's analysis really become evident though when the Maori Party are thrown in to the mix. There are big differences between ACT and the Maori Party on certain issues - particularly with regard to constitutional issues, no one can deny that. But those same issues exist between the Maori Party and National as well - and to pretty much the same extent too.

What the media forget, is that underpinning the Maori Party philosophy is a deep distrust and skepticism about the Government (in general, not this particular one). The Maori Party consistently call for power, control and funding to be removed from the state and given to Iwi, Whanau and Maori themselves. The Maori Party want schools run by Maori, for Maori, prisons run by Maori, for Maori, etc etc.

You may have noticed a few minor changes to the website over the last few days.

What you won't have noticed are the numerous changed behind the scenes.

The ACT on Campus website runs on top of Drupal and we've been busy upgrading our site from Drupal 5, released almost three years ago now, to the latest Drupal 6.12 version.

It will take us a while to integrate into our website all the cool new features that Drupal 6 comes with, and in fact we're still busy sorting out some compatability issues to get the site working like it was before the upgrade, but it will be well worth it once it's done.

Watch this space.