Clark's triumph born out of near tragedy

By JOHN ARMSTRONG

Lucky, lucky Labour. Helen Clark and company came within a whisker of a huge embarrassment on Saturday night.

Had Labour fallen three seats short of the 52 it secured, the Prime Minister would have been in the uncomfortable position of having to rely on both the left-leaning Greens and right-slanting United Future for a majority in Parliament.

Trying to hammer out compromises between those two parties would have been a radical-meets-conservative recipe for paralysis.

Instead, the numbers fell Helen Clark's way, with both minor parties winning just enough seats in their own right to take Labour above the magic 61 figure.

Justifying her decision to call an early election, she now claims a triumph from what was a near-tragedy for the centre-left.

Even better, the arithmetic relegates Winston Peters to Opposition and replaces him with a much more flexible alternative.

Mr Peters' complaints about being left out of the equation drew a typically abrupt response from the Prime Minister yesterday: "Shucks!"

That sounded like revenge for his jilting of Labour in 1996 coalition talks.

Now, Helen Clark can sit Solomon-like between Jeanette Fitzsimons and Peter Dunne, playing one ally off against the other. When one ally withholds support on her left, she should be able to rely on the ally on her right. And vice versa.

That's the theory, anyway, as Labour seeks to hold on to as much power as possible by seeking "collaborative" arrangements limiting the minor parties' role to granting confidence rather than including them in power-sharing coalitions.

Already the Greens are bristling at being treated as Labour's foot-stool. Greens' support for a Labour-Progressive Coalition minority Government will come at a much higher price than it did in 1999.

The Greens are also manoeuvring to shut Mr Dunne out in return for granting Labour support on confidence motions.

And some elements in Labour will not be happy about Mr Dunne entering the "policy loop", as the Prime Minister calls the consultation required to engender his backing.

The best news for Labour is that United Future's nine seats mean the Greens cannot hold a gun at its head. Should the Greens withdraw support on confidence motions when the moratorium on the commercial release of GM organisms is lifted in October next year, Mr Dunne will be there to keep Labour afloat.

Ironically, that should ease tensions when Labour and the Greens get down to serious talks this week. The major point of disagreement will still be there, but the Greens' threat to pull down the Government in 15 months has been nullified.

After an election all about the tail wagging the dog, the dog is back in control.

Helen Clark joins an exclusive club of second-term Labour Prime Ministers. (The others are Michael Savage, Peter Fraser and David Lange.)

And she also increased the governing party's share of the vote for the first time since 1987, a task made even more difficult under MMP, which favours small parties.

But Labour had hoped to do even better when the campaign began four weeks ago and it was polling above 50 per cent.

Party figures argued on Saturday night that those levels were never sustainable; that Labour's core vote is closer to 35 per cent; that supporters cast votes elsewhere because Labour was always going to win.

But the result is a lesson to Labour to think more strategically in 2005.

It attacked the Greens to try to win an outright majority despite its own polling telling the party that people wanted Labour constrained by a coalition partner.

Helen Clark did nothing to help Jeanette Fitzsimons win Coromandel, even though the Greens were slipping towards the 5 per cent threshold.

Laila Harre was killed off in Waitakere. It is questionable why Labour was standing against Jim Anderton in Wigram.

There is also a lesson for Labour in National's woes. Sure, National was a victim of its flaccid campaign. But it was also a victim of tactical voting. Assuming National could not win the election, National-aligned voters could clear their consciences by voting for the local National candidate in the constituency race, freeing them up to cast their party votes elsewhere.

Labour - also the repository of constituency votes - could suffer the same damage as voters become more attuned to the liberating effect of vote-splitting.

Don't write National off. It will bounce back. It is one of the country's strongest institutions. But its limp campaign fragmented the centre-right vote, making that side of the spectrum even more crowded.

Yesterday, Mr Peters was claiming his party would become the major Opposition force. National will have to shout that much harder to get attention.

It has to get hungry for power rather than assuming power will be thrust upon it - as used to be the case under first-past-the-post. This election has destroyed that notion once and for all.

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