John Roughan: Dunne just may be key to the 'healing'

That clean cardboard voting stand has a way of clearing the head. Pencil poised above the list of parties; one box to tick. One stroke. No second chance.

A week earlier I had decided to vote for the Maori Party and said so, right here. It would be, I realised, a wasted vote because the party would almost certainly win more Maori electorate seats than its share of the vote nationwide would bring. But every party tick, I thought, could have symbolic value.

Pencil getting heavy, head heating with the onset of a decision, symbolism evaporated. Maori didn't need a wasted vote from me, they needed help in Parliament to preserve the seats that assure them a voice.

Looking again at the list of parties, only one sounded willing and capable of pulling a National Government back from the brink of social insanity. It could also, if the election went the other way, rescue Labour again from the Greens.

Peter Dunne's little party got my tick and, so far, without regret. Reduced to three seats, it is not really needed by Labour, the likely winner. If the final count leaves the election result much as it is, Helen Clark could govern with the Greens and the "non-opposition" of New Zealand First.

But she had a fright on election night. The divergence of city and country, liberal and conservative, brown and white, beneficiary and taxpayer, has seldom been so stark. She says she wants to "heal" those divisions and must know she cannot do it with the Greens. She obviously wants United Future with her too.

It is less clear that she wants the Maori Party on side. It has won electorates that rejected Labour's old contention that Maori interests were best served inside her party. It cannot be in Labour's interest now for her to reward those voters with a voice in her Government.

But nor is it in the interests of the Maori Party to take its voice inside the closed rooms of a coalition now.

Whatever happens, the Maori Party is the most interesting new element in national politics. Its next important move is not the decision to join or not join a governing arrangement, but rather the procedures it has for making the decision.

Co-leaders Tariana Turia and Pita Sharples promise to take any offers back to meetings of their people. That is what they could do with every bill of any consequence that comes before the next Parliament.

By setting up tribal or regional forums to feed Maori opinion into a national Maori representative body, constituted on Maori traditions, the party could achieve much more than it has done by winning four of the seven Maori seats. It could begin to establish distinct political institutions capable of attracting national attention because their decisions would have the force of independent votes in Parliament.

At the very least the Maori Party promises not to be a conventional partisan organisation. It has demonstrated by its willingness to deal with National - at least until Don Brash declared abolition of its seats non-negotiable - that it is not sitting neatly on the left-right axis. It is a third dimension.

Or perhaps a fourth dimension, since Winston Peters has a prior claim to be the third. His party, too, has shown it can deal with both National and Labour at different times, though its natural instinct is not to govern.

With his decision this time to prop up any government led by the party that wins the most votes, Winston has at last found the perfect formula for his politics. He is the heir of the pre-MMP "protest vote", the refuge of people who didn't care much for politics, didn't trust the major parties because each validly criticised the other, and took part in general elections largely because they should.

They preferred a party that had no prospect of winning power. With the advent of MMP there is no refuge any more. Their votes went to Peters because he posed as the anti-politician who held both serious parties in contempt.

But the first MMP election gave him alone the balance of power and he had to make a decision. Whatever he decided, it was going to be politically disastrous for him. He lost half his constituency the moment he went with National, and steadily more while he was in a government. This time he seems genuinely to want no part of it. That is to say, he wants to be important in the formation and survival of a government but not to carry any candle for its decisions.

He will be committed only to supporting it on votes of confidence in Parliament and to ensure it is supplied with revenue. Beyond that, his party will make up its own mind on every piece of legislation.

The Greens, too, could have been an extra dimension of our politics if, like the German Green Party right now, they were prepared to bargain with either major party.

But the Greens in our Parliament are not only sandal-wearers, cyclists and food puritans, they are as left as the late, lamented Alliance. They were not pushing for very much this week. Their main aim seems to be to get into a cabinet and look reasonable. They probably calculate that if ever they are to lift their support out of single figures they need more people to take them seriously.

Peter Dunne put his finger on the problem with the Greens this week. It was no particular issue, he said on television, it was lifestyle. They look forward to a life for all of us of simple, wholesome, self-sufficiency - enforced, they believe, by the expiry of non-renewable resources and the damage industrialisation is doing to the world's climate.

The dire predictions are almost certainly wrong. Anyone old enough to remember the 1970s knows that doomsday has been postponed already.

But so confident are the Greens that modern living standards are unsustainable they would like to enforce some lifestyle adjustments right now.

They find a life of simple, wholesome, self-sufficiency pleasant and charming. Most people find it a nightmare.

Interesting dealings ahead.