Dialogue: Global search for a winning poll pitch

TIM BALE* says overseas conservative parties may offer the National Party pointers on the best strategy for winning the next election.

What a relief. With the Government's savage honeymoon over, the National Party can forget about those embarrassing efforts to reinvent itself as the party of radical conservatism.

Or was it conservative radicalism? Who cares, anyway? Normal politics has resumed.

National will be back in 2002, ready to pick up where it left off, forcing us to embrace the inevitabilities and insecurities of globalisation, weaning us off our dependence on the nanny state and all its wicked works.

But then again, maybe not. True, you cannot move for talking heads from the financial sector, the Employers Federation or "independent" forecasting groups suggesting that the economy is going to hell as a result of the Government's "bad attitude to business" and its "unprecedented radicalism."

Their message cannot help but get through as interest rates and cigarette and petrol prices rise almost daily.

But it would be a brave - or, better, foolhardy - forecaster who assumed that this doom and gloom will be enough to see National safely through the next 2sfr1/2 years.

Leaving aside those who are ideologically convinced of the centre-left's essential hopelessness or evil, is there any reason to assume that the Clark Government is inherently incapable of delivering, in the run-up to the next election, the impression of governing competence and that it could not win a second term?

If the answer is no, National still has a problem. If it does nothing, then (barring external shocks, of course) all other things will be equal, and it may well lose.

This, along with a refreshingly self-critical analysis of the last election which refuses to put National's defeat down simply to bad luck and poor communication, should be enough to ensure that leader Jenny Shipley does not give up on her attempt to force her party to rethink its strategic direction.

In this, she is not alone. All over the democratic world, the centre-right, in many countries for so long seen as the natural party of government, is out of power and thinking hard about how to get back in.

Many of those parties have similar problems to National. And many have seen mid-term leads bigger than National's evaporate at the polls. It would be surprising if National did not look beyond the polls and the pundits for ideas.

Recently, the left seems to have turned the tables on the right by playing the same trick as the latter pulled off in the post-war period - only in reverse.

The right realised then that it could regain and retain office as long as it promised not to undo, but simply to administer more efficiently, the full-employment, welfare state ushered in by the left.

More recently, instead of falling apart when the apparent triumph of free market liberalism first pushed them out of office, centre-left parties realised that, rather than abandon or undo deregulation, privatisation and welfare reform, they could offer the electorate a kinder, gentler version. This took more account of the social costs of those policies, and pursued them only where such pursuit was pragmatic, rather than ideological.

Consensual, and also confused and concerned about change, voters found and still find it an attractive package. So how can the right compete?

The first option is the shift to the centre, achieved by calling your governing opponents either free-market turncoats (National's 1990 strategy) or fanatical and incompetent left-wingers - National's (at least Bill English's) strategy now.

The drawback is that it is hard to see either label sticking to Helen Clark, Michael Cullen or Jim Anderton, while selling the National Party as centrist or competent requires a collective act of amnesia on the part of the electorate.

The second option is counter-intuitive: a move right. Not on the economy. Rather toward the kind of populist traditionalism on socio-moral issues (tough on crime, immigration, minority rights, environmentalism, welfare dependency) that Act flirted with at the last election.

It is this tack which the British Conservative Party, for so long at a loss what to do with Labour's Tony Blair, and in common with many centre-right opposition parties in Europe, seems to have plumped for. Such a move might have a lot going for it. It de-emphasises that aspect of National's policy which puts people off (the knee-jerk neo-liberalism), while tapping into the flipside of anxieties about socio-economic change.

Alarm that the "common sense" morality and security of middle New Zealand is under threat from politically correct post-materialism and an increasingly ethnically diverse population has not disappeared along with NZ First.

It remains there to be mobilised, if not by Richard Prebble then by Mrs Shipley with her lurid tales of Maori and Pacific Islanders climbing through respectable windows in the dead of night.

But such a strategy has its dangers. It is implicitly racist and authoritarian and may legitimate such attitudes. In addition, those likely to be offended by such a sales pitch are the voters of New Zealand's future, while those attracted by it may soon become its past.

It is not a pitch that seems to have benefited those mainstream conservative parties that have tried it elsewhere.

Whether that is enough to stop National borrowing, even if only a little, such ideas to complement its mooted move toward the centre on matters of tax and spend will be interesting to watch.

* Dr Tim Bale lectures in European politics at Victoria University's school of political science and international relations.