John Roughan: A vote in the interests of good race relations

Decision day is just a week away. What should I do? Should I even say? The secret ballot is a strange thing. Instituted when people stood to suffer reprisals for their political allegiance, almost everybody still feels the need of it.

Very few readily reveal their vote. If they do, it is in the hushed, confidential tone they might use to admit to a crime or a sexual perversion. Why?

I suppose most people feel they do stand to suffer, if only from embarrassment. No political preference is ever unequivocal. Declare you voted Labour and you wear the rough side of Helen as well as the smooth. Admit a vote for National and you feel a bit sheepish about the tax cut.

No matter how earnestly you indulge in political talk, it feels safer to keep the act private. Everything you have said will have led others to guess which way you went, with more certainty than they should. But if you do not confirm it, you feel unsullied.

That is particularly true in this trade. You probably discern a political viewpoint behind most news reports and commentaries on public issues and think little of it. But you would be surprised at the vehemence with which those in the trade deny they have one.

One highly placed and highly opinionated former colleague was so worried he might be discovered to have a political orientation that he would not vote.

It is almost impossible to report or comment on subjects of political substance without taking a point of view.

Strictly neutral commentary has to reduce politics to a contest of popularity and techniques of persuasion. Principles and policies, no matter how necessary, responsible or wise, count against a party if a majority of voters cannot be convinced of their merit.

That's never been my view. I have been taking an attitude here for so long it seems pointless to turn coy at election time.

In any case, it is only the truly partisan who need secrecy. I have voted for both Labour and National at different times. Looking back, I notice that I have nearly always voted for the party in power.

Ever since the fall of Muldoon the governments of this country have been, to my mind, astonishingly good. Not perfect, of course, but consistent and courageous on the two great projects of the past 20 years - the liberalisation of the economy and the national empowerment of Maori.

Neither project, notice, has been exactly popular. Neither was ever really put to voters before an election and arguably neither has ever received a popular endorsement. At least, Helen Clark says that about the economic liberalisation and Don Brash is saying the same of Maori empowerment.

Clark is a democrat in economics and an elitist in race relations. Brash is exactly the reverse. Neither seems to notice the irony when they inveigh against the elitist programme of the other. Thank heaven for elitism. It is halfway to leadership.

For too long, probably, the Maori national revival has been overshadowed by economic change, but at least the Maori project was able quietly to make steady progress. I have feared for the progress of the economy at every change of government since 1984. How happily wrong I was proved to be.

When the fourth Labour Government went to its self-inflicted defeat in 1990, Jim Bolger's National Party promised to return to conservative consensus. Instead it brought the Richardson-Shipley whirlwind and in 1993 I voted for that. Three years later, after Bolger had dumped Richardson and MMP arrived, I voted Act.

In 1999, when Shipley had dumped Bolger and Peters I voted National again. That was the year Helen Clark was coming in. She brought an end to economic reform but did not roll it back significantly. The pain was paying off.

The economy was booming under a Government the public trusted to bring no more drastic change. It was clear at the last election her Government would be comfortably re-elected and the main concern was that it could be hijacked by the Greens. I did my bit to give her an alternative partner.

This time the stakes are different. Both the big strands of progress of the past 20 years are under challenge from the National Party. The threat to Maori is the more worrying but it is not widely realised that National is proposing a basic change in economic management, too.

John Key, the party's finance spokesman, believes the time is right to stop lowering official debt and borrow to expand state investment. He would combine his tax cuts with an increase in public spending and a return to more government borrowing.

The debt does not concern him. "We have slain that dragon," he told a Herald business breakfast this week.

Debt, he believes, was bad while the Government sector was spending more than its revenue, but not now.

Well, maybe. John Key is a generation younger than the Rogergnomes. Fresh from the private sector, he could blow a Budget surplus as fast as George W. Bush, on the same disproven theory that tax cuts generate a net rise in revenue.

The interests of the economy and Maori empowerment might be marginally better served by returning the Government again, but Labour is offering little on both counts.

The party I would most like to do well at this election is a new one. Its economics are probably not to my liking but race relations are under the greater threat now.

The week's developments have left National in a position to win the election and govern with the tacit support of New Zealand First. In that event, Maori would stand to lose most of the official recognition and agencies of government they have gained over the past 20 years. They will need to look to their resources and develop their own national voice.

In the interests of the New Zealand I want, I'd like to help them. I think I'll give this vote to the Maori Party.