KEY POINTS:
It is not hard to imagine how galling it must have been for the Act Party leader Rodney Hide this week to share the limelight with the Maori Party as Prime Minister-in-waiting John Key sorted out the arrangements by which he will form a Government.
Before the election,
as poll after poll suggested that the Maori Party MPs might end up with the balance of power, Hide was at pains to point out that he had always enjoyed working with the party and that it "shares some of our concerns and issues".
He did not elaborate on what these concerns were, but it is safe to say that they did not include Act's bottom lines: tougher prison sentences, abolishing the Emissions Trading Scheme and taking an axe to the public service are not conspicuous Maori Party priorities.
On election night, as National and its two pledged partners Act and United Future gained 65 seats in a 122-seat Parliament, Hide would have been relieved that he was not going to have to get more specific about those "concerns and issues".
His problem is that John Key has taken a different view of coalition possibilities. The National leader is forming a Government that gives him fully 70 votes against the 52 the Labour, Greens and Progressives can muster a majority that is more than comfortable.
But numbers that make Key comfortable are political dyspepsia for Hide. As the Maori Party's five seats the same number as Act came into play, the prospect of a coalition arrangement
in which he would be the sole significant moderating influence rapidly evaporated before the Act leader's eyes.
The subtext of Key's decision to enter negotiations with the Maori Party seemed to elude Hide for several days. In the early part of the week, he swaggered through interviews, laying down the law as if the Prime Minister-elect were an errand boy for an Act-led administration. "No," he said, baldly when asked if National could convince Act to support a reworked emissions trading scheme after it had campaigned on a promise to abolish it. He also
suggested that Key was sometimes more left-wing than Helen Clark a revealingly anachronistic turn of phrase and that he remained hopeful on a Cabinet post for Roger Douglas.
This was not so much an early attempt of a tail to wag a dog, as it was ill-advised posturing, given the numbers. Te Tai Tokerau MP Hone Harawira spoke for many when he chided Hide for "throwing his weight around".
Key's decision to hold talks with the Maori Party was shrewd. In the first place though it was quite possibly of secondary importance to him it sends a message to the Act Party that the whip hand it holds is not quite as well-muscled as Hide seems to think. Having the Maori MPs to rely on gives Key plenty of breathing space if Hide's barking and straining at the leash later becomes an impediment to good governance. At the same time, Key signals
to a country in roughly equal measure hungry for and apprehensive about change, that he does not plan any radical policy shifts.
More important, his reaching out to the Maori Party sends an important message to its constituency. He will not park it up and ignore it as Labour twice did to the Greens. He could read the significance of an election result which delivered the Maori Party a fifth MP and returned the existing four with voting tallies more than twice those of their nearest rivals.
Treated with such respect, the Maori MPs unsurprisingly bristled at new Labour leader Phil Goff's patronising warning that they should beware of doing a deal with the Nats. The leader of the party whose Seabed and Foreshore Act triggered the birth of the Maori Party may live to rue his arrogant remark, which had more than a whiff of sour grapes about it.
Key knows that within his ranks are some staunchly opposed to the existence of the Maori seats. But in reaching out to the people who hold them, he acknowledges that he needs to take Maori with him and have them alongside him _ if he is to address the social problems that so disproportionately beset them. For a new leader, it is a promising start.
