John Armstrong: Mallard mucks up

The Labour Party could be excused for looking for a room in the Beehive where it can hide Trevor Mallard, lock the door and throw away the key for the rest of the election campaign.

In claiming Don Brash is in the pocket of the Americans, Mallard, as minister responsible for tertiary education, certainly succeeded in blasting National's plan to offer tax rebates on interest paid on student loans off the top of the news bulletins.

Unfortunately for Labour, his reckless assertion that National Party policy is being written in Washington backfired on him not only for lacking even a skerrick of solid evidence.

His gaffe has also derailed the Prime Minister's more patient offensive on Brash's trustworthiness.

His lapse is testimony to the unwritten law of election campaigns: when things start going wrong, they tend to keep going wrong.

The question being increasingly asked now is whether Labour is going to get anything right in this campaign.

Mallard has egg on his face because he over-egged the pudding.

Brash's evasive replies to questions seeking to pinpoint National's position on sending troops to Iraq, coupled with Helen Clark's reminders of some of Brash's more gung-ho statements on the subject, were doing the job for Labour.

Voters aren't stupid. They could make their own judgment. They did not need Mallard to lay it on with a trowel.

The subsequent embarrassment turned Thursday's pitbull into Friday's poodle with Mallard trying to stick to his guns at the same time he was toning things down.

He had little option given they had been effectively rubbished by the American Embassy, the Prime Minister had declined to lend her weight to the accusations, and, to complete the misery, the wealthy American "bagman" purportedly fund-raising on National's behalf announced he had made a past donation to a Labour MP's campaign.

The episode is revealing for what it says about Labour's current frame of mind.

The polls continue to show National ahead, so Labour is desperate for a circuit-breaker to turn things around before the official election campaign kicks off.

Brash's inability to put the Iraq question to bed loomed as a good enough circuitbreaker for Labour strategists to hurriedly switch tack make his credibility the theme of the party's new billboard adverts.

The temptation to hammer home the advantage must have proved irresistible, especially to an attack-dog like Mallard.

But all he revealed was Labour's desperation - a desperation resulting from Labour's palpable failure to adjust to National's campaign strategy being smarter and sharper than in the three previous MMP elections.

Labour's resorting to the politics of fear and smear is admission that National is striking a chord with voters by talking about the issues really worrying them - and Iraq is not likely to be one - and offering some straightforward policies to deal with them.

However, the crucial difference at this election is National's willingness to break out of the straitjacket it had wrapped itself in.

National recognised that while it could still outflank Labour on the right on some issues - welfare reform, and law and order, for example - it also had to outflank Labour in the centre-ground to capture enough votes to win the election.

Clark's strategy has been to dominate the centre, forcing National to shift rightwards for fresh ideas, knowing that was a dead end in terms of votes.

With an economic dry like Brash at National's helm, Labour could assume the old enemy was even more likely to ghettoise itself.

But Brash has done the opposite.

Take tax cuts. Not long ago, National would have heeded Michael Cullen's warning that substantial cuts were fiscally irresponsible. Instead, it is relaxed about running smaller surpluses and borrowing to pay for infrastructure projects.

The upshot is National has given itself room to be generous, while Cullen's fiscal orthodoxy makes him sound mean.

Take National's new policy of tax rebates for childcare and tax deductibility for interest payments on student loans.

In the not-too-distant past, such tax concessions would have been seen as heresy.

It is understood some purists in the National caucus choked at re-introducing rebates.

However, again it is Cullen who is expressing the orthodox view in saying that Brash is messing up the simplified taxsystem.

That may place Labour on the wrong side of the argument.

A tax rebate is something everyone understands. The childcare rebate is likewise simple and more tangible than Labour's more complex, but arguably more generous, funding arrangements for pre-school care.

Labour's alternative is part of its much bigger, but hideously complicated, Working for Families package, which targets assistance to low- to middle-income families.

National took a lesson from a complicated change it made to the student loan scheme in the 1990s to help the low-paid to keep paying off the principal of their loan.

The lesson was that if the voters did not understand the policy, there was no political benefit. It is a lesson Labour is learning the hard way, thanks to its Working for Families behemoth.

National's tax breaks are easily understood and therefore easy to sell - especially to the 16 per cent of the voting population paying off a student loan.

For those no longer studying, Labour's counter-argument that National's tax break will be wiped out by increases in course fees is irrelevant. Those voters will instead be asking what Labour is offering to speed the repayment of loans which, on average, take more than nine years to clear.

Labour may have its own reasons for delaying the release of its policy. But National has got in first.

Labour's policy will now be seen as being more about matching National and less about easing the loan burden.

As the incumbent Government, Labour also has to counter the charge it should have done more to lessen the burden.

Defending the absence of his own policy, Mallard claimed National had timed its release to take the spotlight off Brash's problems with Iraq.

Mallard then decided to ram home his point by saying Brash did not want to talk about Iraq because he was beholden to those funding National's campaign.

But the smear only smeared the smearer.

Brash was able to escape a torrid week and clamber for the safety of the moral high ground.

The election - he was able to declare yesterday - had come down to a choice between the party rolling out policy and the party rolling in the gutter.

That statement is something Labour might well reflect on.