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So Helen Clark and Michael Cullen are finally shuffling off after a staggering fifty four years of combined Parliamentary experience.
Clearly they are the giants of their generation. I personally feel that on the basis of brain power, strategic ability and resolve they were the most impressive, effective and, yes sometimes, intimidating politicians, I have encountered in the eleven years I've spent here in the Parliamentary Press Gallery.
To interview either of them in a long form, live, television interview was not something you undertook lightly. Strange then that I feel their departures are anti-climactic.
Before she walked into Parliament to speak for the final time on Wednesday I rather naively hoped Helen Clark may let her guard down even for a minute. But no she remained the ice queen in the white trouser suit.
Her valedictory was like her premiership: cautious and competent; meticulous and managerial. I'd hoped Helen Clark might show us a flicker of feeling; a sliver of humanity; a scintilla of humility.
Many of us in the press gallery know the human side of Helen Clark.
Back in the early days of her tenure she'd often cold call to let you know her thinking on some significant matter of state or simply to gossip about an embattled Minister or a wayward chief executive. She has quite a wicked sense of humour and a keenly developed sense of schadenfreude.
It's a shame she didn't share some of those human traits in her farewell speech - share some of what it felt like to be Prime Minister.
It was similar when she spoke to us on TVNZ's Q+A show last Sunday. There was no acknowledgement of her mistakes. Could she not have conceded to mishandling the anti-smacking law? To rushing the Electoral Finance Act? To being a little too lenient in her handling of Winston Peters?
I think she owed it to Labour to show a little contrition about the election defeat.
Clark sticks to the line that New Zealanders only voted National because they felt they could have the same policies with a new face. With that statement there is the underlying belief that before too long voters will realise the grave mistake they made in throwing her out.
Clark, as the defeated and departing Prime Minister, could have done her party a favour by admitting Labour had lost touch with voters by the end of its third term. It would have allowed the beginning of the catharsis that Labour so desperately needs.
Cullen's departure is likewise a little anti-climactic for me.
Personally I have never met anyone, anywhere, in any sphere of life who I felt had more brain power than Michael Cullen. He had a head spinning convergence of wit and wisdom and the ability to crushingly humiliate his opponents, whether they be in the press gallery or the National party.
Ask Bill English. As a young Opposition leader struggling against an unstoppable Helen Clark, Cullen once described him as "a boy sent to do a women's job".
I actually think that being No 2 on the board of New Zealand Post isn't big enough for Cullen.
I know he didn't want to live overseas because of family commitments and I respect that. But why not return to his love of history? Head a university like Steve Maharey did? Or something I'd really like to see: try his hand in business and see whether the economic theory translates into reality.
Sure, these are personal decisions. But as I watched him defensively answering questions about going to work on the board of a State Owned Enterprise under a National government he'd accused of having a secret privatisation agenda, I just felt it was a little demeaning for a giant of New Zealand politics.
So where does this all leave Labour's new leader Phil Goff?
It's not the falling of Labour's two great Kauri which should worry Goff but the slow sprouting of a new sapling.
National's growing relationship with the Greens gives John Key yet another political ally and while the agreement is limited to a narrow range of issues it lays the seeds for something much closer in the coming years. It is now entirely conceivable Green MPs could be Ministers after a 2011 National Party victory.
The effect is almost total isolation for Goff. Where once Labour was the MMP champion with a string of political partners now Goff looks around to find only Jim Anderton's one man band the Progressives in support.
Anderton is older than both Clark and Cullen. Like those two greats, he must also be considering shuffling off the political stage.
