Mike Williams: Key's crew may just have third term-itis

Mike Williams

I DROVE from Auckland to Kaikohe and back on Thursday. The Howard League literacy prisoner programme is getting under way in the jail at Ngawha Springs, just south of Kaikohe, and I had material to deliver and people to meet.

You would not have twigged that there had been a hard-fought by-election only a few weeks before, apart from one billboard in Kawakawa.

It was the Labour Party candidate, Willow-Jean Prime, smiling fetchingly with just the words "Thank You" and a large tick. Clearly this young and promising woman's ambitions are as yet unfulfilled.

New Zealand is an outlier for banning all political advertising on an election day, and I wonder if that law is becoming redundant with rapidly increasing numbers taking advantage of liberalised early voting opportunities.

The seven hours of driving was a chance for thinking about the political direction of the country and wondering if we are approaching the tipping point when voters tire of a governing party and start shopping around for the next.

The John Key National-led Government is now getting towards eight months into its third term and showing some signs of "third term-itis".

Though very few New Zealand governments get elected four times in a row and there were only two last century that managed that feat, it's hard to pin down exactly why that is so.

It does seem probable that, after two terms in office, governing parties simply run out of ideas.

That may well be what is now happening with National.

Labour MP Chris Hipkins drew annoyance from Gerry Brownlee this week by pointing out that the Order Paper (the list of coming parliamentary business) was extremely thin and several of National's "flagship" policies, announced since the general election, have gone nowhere.

The idea of turning over significant numbers of Housing Corporation properties to community groups seems dead in the water, since the Salvation Army turned the offer down, and the rewrite of the Resource Management Act is now in jeopardy because of National's thumping defeat in Northland.

This kind of political torpor led to some embarrassment last week when the Prime Minister made two pre-Budget announcements which were widely panned by the commentariat. One was about new school building (inevitable given population growth) and another about more money for research and development (only partly restoring earlier cuts).

It might be better, as columnist Jane Clifton cheekily suggested, not to bother with a Budget this year.

National's formerly overarching objective of bringing the government's accounts into surplus this year has also fallen by the wayside.

Some of the Key Government's other ambitious aims now also seem in trouble. A focus on expanding mining and oil and gas exploration is fanciful given the plummeting price of commodities like coal and oil and the romance with fracked gas in the Northern Hemisphere.

I have no doubt that major oil and gas fields are to be found somewhere in New Zealand's massive Exclusive Economic Zone, but we are a very long way from the big markets and demand is historically weak.

Ambitious irrigation development projects with the objective of boosting agricultural production, as Hawke's Bay people will know, are also proving slow and problematic.

If the voters are indeed starting to shop around, as they certainly did in Northland, then a focus will come on to the Labour Party, the only party other than National to possibly lead a government after the 2017 general election.

In 2014 Labour scored its worst result since the 1920s, winning just 25 per cent of the crucial party vote but, since then, there have been signs of a recovery and polls now have the party's support at 30 per cent.

That level will not be enough and the coming year will be crucial if Labour is to have a fighting chance of winning in two years' time.

Andrew Little won the leadership by being everyone's second choice but has so far performed well. He achieved the rare coup of putting the PM down with his "cut the crap" comment when Key was trying to muddy the waters over his text-message relationship with the reviled blogger Cameron Slater, and he handled the potentially painful situation in Northland well.

Internal sources report that Little wears the leadership mantle easily and is developing real authority, but a review of the party and the last election, led by Bryan Gould, could have some trip-wires, and policy development will have to be meticulous and well sold both to the party and the public.

The unwieldy governing New Zealand Council of the party is overdue for reform.

This plus renewal in the caucus and the golden opportunity of the party's centennial next year will be the challenges Little will face in the coming year.

-Mike Williams grew up in Hawke's Bay. He is a supporter of pro-amalgamation group A Better Hawke's Bay (Amalgamate Hawke's Bay). He is chief executive of the NZ Howard League and a former president of the Labour Party. He is a political commentator and can be heard on Radio NZ's Nine to Noon programme at 11am on Mondays and Sean Plunket's RadioLive show at 11am on Fridays. All opinions in this column are his and not the newspaper's.