John Armstrong: National shoots its other foot

Does National have a death-wish? How else to explain its seeming inexhaustible capacity for self-inflicted damage.

No sooner has the party recovered from shooting itself in one foot than it is hobbling in pain on the other.

National should have happily spent yesterday ridiculing the Cabinet's whip-round to pay for fines stemming from the motorcade case. Somehow, National managed to overshadow even that farce.

Taken in isolation, the shambles over Brian Connell's unauthorised release of the party's forestry policy, the party's pulling of him from a radio interview and the confusion over whether National would permit the chopping down of more native trees does not matter much in the larger scheme of things.

Likewise, the strange business of Gerry Brownlee being drafted in to represent National in a radio debate on foreign policy because the party was worried Phil Goff would humiliate foreign affairs spokesman Lockwood Smith.

However, the accumulation of such embarrassments is extremely corrosive on poll ratings.

It is a truism of Opposition that if you want to become the Government, you have to look like you are ready to govern. National looks anything but.

With three weeks to go, the party knows it really had to be in front of Labour at this stage as insurance against the ruling party making up ground closer to election day.

National also needs to be ahead of Labour because it has fewer options when it comes to coalition partners.

Instead, National is trailing Labour by a whopping nine percentage points in today's Herald-DigiPoll survey despite Monday's launch of its tax policy.

The one bright spot is that the Herald-DigiPoll recorded a lift in National's support among respondents questioned in the wake of the launch. That seems to have occurred in the election-swinging $52,000-$77,000 middle-income range. In other Herald-DigiPolls this year, Labour has been ahead in that salary band. That has now reversed. Labour has made up ground among lower income earners, who are anyway less likely to give National their votes.

It may therefore still be too early to be definitive about the tax package's impact on the election.

However, the fuss over Don Brash's claim to have gone easy on Helen Clark during Monday night's leaders' debate, followed by yesterday's distractions, has shifted the focus off National's efforts to sell its tax cuts.

Displaying all the sensitivity of a heat-seeking missile, the Prime Minister immediately zeroed in on the forestry foul-up to turn it into the wider issue of Dr Brash's competence as a leader and a potential Prime Minister.

While he might not like shouting at her, he needs to start shouting at some of his colleagues.

Unless more discipline is brought to National's campaign, it will be over before it has barely begun.