Jonathan Milne: Caution the watchword for National

Some people use their brains to think
Some use them to make art
Some politicians use their brains
To keep their ears apart

The author of that little rhyme is poet John Ansell. But it is another rhyme that he will be remembered for: "Iwi/Kiwi".

Ansell is one of the creative geniuses behind the National Party's rather clever billboards, including one claiming Labour would give the beaches to iwi, while National would preserve them for every Kiwi.

The party's billboards have gained advertising industry acclaim and the party's polling is up: a TV3-TNS poll on Thursday was the latest to show National within four points of Labour, and NZ First polling high enough to offer a coalition option.

National MPs even got to joking about offering NZ First leader Winston Peters the office of Governor-General, when Dame Silvia Cartwright steps down in August next year, in exchange for his party's support.

So National MPs and delegates are cautiously optimistic as they head into their election year conference in Wellington, beginning on Friday.

The emphasis being on "cautiously". If National has learned one thing from the Government in recent weeks, it is how easily a small gaffe can blow up into a major embarrassment in election year. Similarly problematic are skeletons lurking in closets, as Act candidate Andy Poulsen (withdrawn) has discovered.

Indeed, National has been reticent in pursuing stood-down associate education minister David Benson-Pope over allegations he bullied students when he was a teacher, concerned that it was doing them no more good than it was doing Labour.

So the Nats, and leader Don Brash in particular, will be trying to look dignified next weekend, trying to avoid any perception of muckraking or scandal-mongering.
Instead, the conference will be focused on "tackling the issues of mainstream New Zealanders" and Brash's speech on Sunday will lay out a broad plan of where he would take New Zealand.

Please note, he is not using the "vision" word: voters have had enough of self-proclaimed visionaries.

The other phrase that will be missing at the conference is "tax cuts" - despite finance spokesman John Key's promise to cut personal taxes by Christmas, a deadline that was extended within days to April next year.

Instead, the phrase will be "tax relief". It is a nicely marketable phrase that avoids reminding the public that the tax cuts would be funded through cuts to the public service.

It would also allow National to simply move the personal income tax thresholds, rather than actually cutting the rates, if that was all they could afford.

And still there will be no details of the "relief": those details will be announced in the week or two after the Prime Minister announces an election date.

When National was still contemplating a July election, they went so far as to book a conference room in a central Auckland hotel earlier this month for a speech to announce the cuts. Then they tried to reschedule for a later date, but the room was already booked by someone else. So now they are just waiting - like everyone else - for Helen Clark to announce an election date and the beginning of the campaign proper.

- HERALD ON SUNDAY