Claire Trevett: Gamemakers wreak havoc but leaders battle on

Labour leader David Cunliffe with Green Party co-leaders Metiria Turei and Russel Norman. Photo / TVNZ

There are just two days until the whistle blows on an unprecedented campaign. That campaign was most notable for the powerful role played by people who were not even running for election. Nicky Hager, Kim Dotcom, Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden time-shared in a role akin to the Gamemakers in the Hunger Games - each tossing their own twist into the playing field to wreak havoc.

How did the leaders perform?

Prime Minister John Key: He had to abandon the usual playbook early on and instead resort to treating the campaign as a game of bullrush.

He spent the first half of campaign trying to dodge around Nicky Hager's Dirty Politics book and the woeful plight of Judith Collins. In the second half, he faced international players drafted in by other rival teams: American Greenwald, Briton Snowden and Australian Julian Assange.

Key at first tried a "lie back and think of England" approach to it all, attempting to ride through till it had passed. When that failed, he skipped from front foot to back foot and back again, over and over. Then Eminem made a late entry to the game, with one of his publishers issuing legal action against National over the use of music similar to Eminem's Lose Yourself. Key probably wished he could by this stage. The only disturbing outward sign of perturbance was a confusing tendency to rely on analogies. Derided for over-reliance on rugby analogies in the early stages, he expanded his game plan significantly. Labour's Capital Gains Tax "barked like a dog, smelled like a dog and it is a dog". This week's analogies involved Martians (no, nothing to do with Colin Craig), German automobiles (no nothing to do with Kim Dotcom) and likening the GCSB's initial work on mass cyber surveillance to modes of transport between Christchurch to Dunedin.

Labour leader David Cunliffe: The debates between Key and Cunliffe indicated David could well follow in the footsteps of his namesake by overcoming Goliath. Alas, this particular David's slingshot was subsequently confiscated in the interests of the Vote Positive campaign. It was too focused on trying to secure a "game changer" from a debate and so Team Labour struggled to adapt to the rapidly changing nature and fast pace of the campaign.

That saw other, smaller teams' players hogging the field for much of the match leaving him struggling to get off the reserves bench. Cunliffe failed to capitalise when Goliath's team went one player down with the plight of Judith Collins. Labour also released all of its key policies early on, leaving it with little left to recapture voters' imaginations in the closing stages of the campaign. It sought to get traction on the issue of foreign investment and land ownership but forgot there was already a professional populist on the course in the form of Winston Peters. Cunliffe was not short of baffling analogies himself, describing National's welfare policy as "wishing for a pony". No, we don't understand either.

Cunliffe appeared to adhere to the "absence makes the heart grow fonder" school of thought when it came to campaigning. He showed a preference for home turf -- spending a significant portion of the campaign in Auckland speaking to friendly audiences. There was a logical basis to it: a third of the country lives in Auckland and Labour decided it needed to focus on getting its vote out. But campaigns are as much about being seen to put in the hard yards day after day -- and working for the whole country.

While Cunliffe stuck mainly to Labour-friendly areas and took up to two days off the trail to prepare for the debates, Key was up at the crack of dawn almost daily to hurl himself around the country's malls with abandon.

Neither National nor Labour gained or lost much from the campaign. If Hager and Dotcom et al's aim was to help the left, it failed rather miserably. The left has barely moved. The Greens just had to sit and watch as Labour voters flooded to them. But there was a far more brutal battle for National voters concerned by the shenanigans.

That battle was between Peters and Conservative leader Colin Craig as the old tusker sought to stop the young pretender from drafting voters away. Craig has played a blinder after pegging back his more bonkers utterances.

Showing surprising political agility, Craig started to present himself as a credible alternative for National voters fed up with the morass the party was in. He put himself in a position of being able to provide National with a stable coalition partner while also pledging to hold them to account over dirty politics. Peters overcame Craig -- at least in the short term. The wily old devil knows exactly how to squeeze votes out of a scandal.

After all that mess, the campaign ends as it began: on a knife edge between left and right and with several political careers in the balance. Will Cunliffe hold on if Labour's vote does collapse? If it doesn't, how will New Zealand react if a man with the support of only one in 10 voters becomes Prime Minister while a man with the support of more than half is sent to an early retirement?

Whatever their differences, by campaign's end Key and Cunliffe had one thing in common: they had had more than enough of Kim Dotcom.

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