Goff, Key reveal core beliefs

John Key believes that his spirit will survive him and Phil Goff believes there is "a force that is beyond mankind" - but neither of our rival leaders believes he is going to heaven.

"I don't believe in an afterlife," said Mr Goff, simply.

Mr Key was a bit more circuitous.

"I can't tell you what happens the moment you die but I don't believe you go to another form," he said.

"I do think you have a spirit that moves to the next - it's part of you and it lives on in your children. But I just don't believe you go off to dancing around in the clouds."

It must be election year, because both party leaders submitted to 45-minute interviews with Family First director Bob McCoskrie in front of 220 people at the annual Forum on the Family at Mangere's Life Convention Centre yesterday.

But on the moral issues that concerned Mr McCoskrie, they were surprisingly akin. Both were prepared to look at same-sex adoptions, both supported a split drinking age of 20 at bottle stores and 18 in pubs, both were sympathetic towards euthanasia, and neither had any stomach for changing the laws on smacking or abortion.

"They were like twins," said one listener afterwards.

Mr Key, who described his Jewish mother as "extremely liberal", refused to be drawn by Mr McCoskrie's attempt to get him to endorse marriage between a man and a woman as the foundation of society - even when tempted by a photo of himself kissing wife Bronagh at the Taj Mahal last week.

"My 16-year-old son sent me a text saying 'not cool'," he said.


Asked about a proposed bill allowing same-sex couples to adopt children, he said: "I can understand a situation and might support a same-sex adoption. I'm more thinking of a scenario where you have a heterosexual couple who break up.

"The single most important thing you can do for your kid is love them."

Mr Goff, who was brought up a Catholic and has been married for 31 years, said he personally believed in marriage but he knew unmarried heterosexual and same-sex couples who had "brought up children and done a brilliant job".

"I think if you have a single focus, the focus would be never putting children into a position where they are not being brought up in a stable, healthy and supportive environment, regardless of the gender of either parent," he said.

On euthanasia, Mr Key said he voted for the first reading of a private member's bill to legalise it in 2003 and would vote for a bill to go to a select committee if it came up again.

Mr Goff said that when his mother was terminally ill three years ago, stopped eating and wanted to die, the family refused to let her.

"She lived for three months, but those three months were entirely without quality and all of us now wonder whether we did the right thing," he said.

"It's a hard question. I think we should keep discussing it. I would want to have the choice."