John Armstrong: Big guns not needed in 'crisis'

The public bickering between National's support partners, Act and the Maori Party, over Maori seats on the Auckland Super City Council was never going to develop into the kind of crisis capable of destabilising the Government.

The problem is that slack coalition management on National's part has ended up making things look much worse than they actually are.

Rodney Hide may have put the cat among the pigeons by warning he would resign his Local Government portfolio rather than find himself in charge of legislation enacting separate Maori representation on the council.

But the National Cabinet was never going to reverse its April decision ruling out Maori seats and suddenly endorse the idea.

Neither had the Maori Party made establishment of such seats a bottom-line for it continuing to support National on confidence and supply motions. It has bigger kai moana to fry.

In short, Hide was never going to be forced into a position where he felt obliged to resign. This was not a coalition breaker.

These truths have defused any sense of "crisis" surrounding the past week's developments. Nothing has actually changed materially.

What should worry the Prime Minister is the ease with which the participants in this argument slotted so easily into the adversarial roles that would be manifest in a real crisis.

This episode looked like some tawdry dress rehearsal for the time when Act and the Maori Party are at polar opposites on an issue of principle and are utterly unwilling to back down or compromise and John Key is forced to come down on one side or the other.

That inevitability may be some time away. The four parties (not forgetting United Future) in the governing arrangement are still overflowing with praise for one another. They can see things are going so swimmingly well behind the scenes in terms of co-operation.

That is no excuse to be blase about coalition management.

True, the disagreement between Act and the Maori Party is unusual in impinging directly on Hide's Local Government portfolio.

However, Hide warned Key back in June that he would not be prepared to guide legislation through Parliament that he could not support.

Faced with that kind of ultimatum, Key's predecessor as Prime Minister would have moved mountains to find a compromise that satisfied both support partners, rather than have them rowing with one another in public.

Rather than demand self-discipline from the Government's components, Key seems to be more relaxed about friction between them. Arguably, this approach may have longer-term benefits in giving Act and the Maori Party more room to breathe rather than seeing them suffocated - the fate of minor parties in previous governing arrangements.

The trouble is the loser in any policy dispute becomes obvious - the Maori Party in this case.

Hide emerges as the winner - and a very public one which will leave National pondering his real motives. In the process, however, Hide has used his "threat to resign" card, something that can only be played once without losing credibility.

For his part, Key has left himself exposed to taunts of tails wagging dogs and failing to show leadership by not calling Hide's bluff.

Doing so might have only upped the ante, however, potentially disrupting National's relationship with its ally and leaving Key facing accusations he could not hold his Government together.

The time may well come when the Prime Minister will have to call Act's bluff regardless of the potential consequences. This was definitely not the occasion to take the nuclear option.