KEY POINTS:
One issue which has attracted a lot of attention in recent years but almost none in the election campaign is the country's monetary policy arrangements.
Almost but not quite. New Zealand First leader Winston Peters on TV One's Agenda programme on Sunday suggested that rewriting the Reserve Bank
Act to make it more exporter-friendly would be a bottom line in any post-election negotiations.
Almost but not quite. He would "expect" a change in the act, which is not quite "insist" or "demand", leaving the impression that should he be in a position once more to serve the country at a ministerial level, disappointment on this issue would not be an insuperable obstacle.
Any more than it was last time, for him or for another long-standing critic of the act, Progressive leader Jim Anderton. Anderton wants the bank, in conducting monetary policy, to have regard not only to inflation but to the balance of payments, exchange rate, employment and the stability of the housing market.
But a lengthy inquiry into the monetary policy framework by the finance and expenditure select committee, which reported in September, very largely endorsed the status quo.
It recommended no changes to the act, or to the policy targets agreement between the Government and the Governor, or to the Governor's sole decision-maker status. It could offer no alternative instruments other than the official cash rate - just as an earlier search party of officials sent on a similar quest came back empty-handed.
And it shrank from recommending any changes to the tax treatment of housing which some submitters had suggested lay at the heart of the difficulty monetary policy has had in dousing inflationary fires in that sector.
The view that monetary policy has inflicted a lot of collateral damage on the export sector rests on the theory that the exchange rate is driven by interest rate differentials.
Formal studies give limited support for this idea, however, and the events of the past few months undermine it too.
The dollar has fallen sharply even though other central banks, as well as ours, have slashed their policy rates so that the gap has not changed much.
Other factors like the outlook for growth and commodities prices, and a tendency for money to head for its home port in stormy times, have proven more potent than the quest for yield.
Likewise the tendency to cite the US Federal Reserve's dual mandate - curbing inflation and fostering employment - as a better option has taken a knock with the credit crunch. It may have contributed to the loose monetary policy of the Greenspan Fed five years ago, which inflated the bubble that has now so messily burst.
Despite some public fretting about the status quo at senior ministerial level earlier this year, Labour devotes only one sentence to monetary policy in its 17-page economic policy document. It speaks of the need to co-ordinate fiscal and monetary policy - code for not cutting taxes when the economy is running hot.
National for its part was firmly in the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" camp during the select committee process.
That seems the most likely outcome.
