Audrey Young: Winston of old needs to return to domestic fray

There is one silver lining for New Zealand First's $158,000 of unlawful election spending. It will focus leader Winston Peters back on to domestic issues where he has not been seriously engaged since becoming Foreign Minister a year ago.

But his willingness to challenge the Auditor-General's finding that the spending was unlawful is an indication of just how out of touch he has become with the public support he seeks.

The Peters of old would be more careful with his targets.

There is no comparison between going after the Auditor General and Peters' victory in challenging the Winebox inquiry findings - the old Peters would relish going after the Sheriff of Nottingham, not Robin Hood.

The question is not whether he still knows what people think, but whether he cares.

A big surprise for many members of New Zealand First who will be at the party convention at the North Shore today is that such a poor campaign as the party ran last year should still be causing it so much trouble.

The conference is a critical one for the party's relationship with the parliamentary wing.

Last year, Peters had to convince the party that he had the country's interest and not his own at heart when he took a ministerial post less than two months after saying he wouldn't.

This year he has to convince members that taking the job of Foreign Minister has not too badly compromised his ability to lead the party, which is in a particularly fragile state at present.

While there is no prospect of the party trading him in, he has clearly not been able to optimally manage both jobs.

He has not even cared to make a virtue of some of the successes he could claim as Foreign Minister.

He could have done so this week, for example.

In the wake of the North Korea nuclear test, it was a golden chance to show what sort of statesman he has become on one of the most serious threats to regional and global security in recent times. But he squandered that opportunity.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had been up all night on Sunday after news of the test, and by 7.30am on Monday she called Peters.

This was greatly surprising to everyone, even seasoned foreign affairs observers at a Korea seminar on Tuesday morning, where Peters first revealed the call. It was a surprise that New Zealand mattered to the US on the issue.

When it came to telling Parliament about it the next day, as he should have with a sense of importance and seriousness, Peters led the House into an unseemly squabble between himself and junior backbenchers.

As master of the House, he cannot blame others. If Peters had demanded serious attention, he would have received it. Instead he wasted what could have been one of his finer moments as Foreign Minister.

It was the first time Peters had control of a signature Labour policy, nuclear testing, instead of predecessor Phil Goff who has kept his hand in Foreign Affairs by claiming the Disarmament portfolio, and he blew it. The unimpressed look on the face of Prime Minister Helen Clark was telling.

Peters appears to neglect a critical aspect of foreign policy - domestic approval.

Equally revealing about Peters' neglect of opinion at home is his unfathomable failure to have announced a significant development involving the United States, related to North Korea.

He has made nothing of the fact that New Zealand has been invited to participate in two sets of multilateral talks, known as five plus five, over North Korea.

The first took place in July at Kuala Lumpur on the margins of the Asean regional forum and the next in September in New York on the margins of the United Nations general assembly.

New Zealand has diplomatic relations with North Korea, and a good relationship with China and a long one with Japan. While the invitation was clearly rooted in the United States' interests rather than Peters' personal attributes, it has happened on his watch and he should have been shouting about it.

It has to be acknowledged that there was no deliberate intention to keep it secret until this week - and his illness following the Kuala Lumpur meeting perhaps explains part of the silence.

But it is surely evidence that his head is not in domestic politics. His party will be desperately looking for evidence to the contrary this weekend. And it will be looking for a sign that he plans to stand in 2008.

The party organisation and, to a large extent, the caucus has been leader-less for a year.

The result, as one delegate put it this week, is that it is "crisis time for the party".

That wouldn't matter if it were a small party of no consequence. But it is a small party that matters a lot in terms of providing stability to the present Government. And it could easily determine who leads the next Government, if it manages to survive.

The fact that MP Barbara Stewart is challenging one-term president and former MP Dail Jones for the presidency of the party points to some failure of Peters' leadership.

It should never have come to this. Big parties can withstand such contests. Smaller parties can die by them.

The caucus went sour on their old colleague Jones soon after he was elected last year.

Jones visited electorates and told many of them he wanted to clean out the caucus at the next election - except for Peters.

He followed that up last month with comments in the Herald saying he was searching around for new talent who could possibly lead the party to the election after next, in 2011.

Stewart was urged by caucus members to challenge Jones but none has come out and publicly backed her.

Anyone who paints the contest as a sign of a healthy democratic party is kidding.

It is being billed as a contest of ideas over how to rejuvenate the party. Put another way, it is about whether there is a wholesale clean-out of the caucus next election (except Peters) or just a few new fresh faces in high list positions.

It is a dangerous split - a loss by Stewart could be seen as a vote of no confidence in the caucus.

The party is not without reasons to celebrate. It has had a few successes, not least being the agreement of an inquiry into local body rates. But there are internal concerns that it has not marked out clear enough ground to make its own in the next two years.

Peters may be doing an acceptable job overseas as Foreign Minister but he has not been doing an acceptable job back home.

He is plagued by speculation about him taking a diplomatic post before the next election.

Peters is of far more value to Labour as an alternative to the Greens and Maori Party so it is hardly in Labour's interests to bundle him off to New York or London.

The confirmation many delegates will desperately want to hear at the conference is not just that he is dedicated to lead them into the next election, but that he is dedicated to them now.