Editorial: New party welcome in politics

It is seldom a good idea to suppress any form of information. Take opinion polls. Quite a number of people, especially politicians, would like to suppress polls during election campaigns on the grounds that they can influence the result. And, of course, they can. Polls tell people how others intend to vote and that information can be crucial in people's decisions, particularly in a multi-party system where small parties may be pivotal. The value of that has never been better illustrated than in the week leading to the election last Saturday.

During the previous week the leader of a little-known party, United Future, attracted unexpected interest after a television debate, mainly because a dubious "worm" driven by uncommitted voters had risen to his every utterance. But it was not until a week later, when a Herald-DigiPoll survey had found as many as 6 per cent intended to vote for Peter Dunne's party, that serious attention began to be paid to it.

In the days after that poll, newspapers, radio and television took a close look at the people on Mr Dunne's list. The public discovered that he is no longer leading the multi-ethnic party he squired at the last election and now heads a party with a distinct religious base.

We learned that its main mission in politics is to strengthen family life, and to that end it wants a commission for the family, better education for marriage and relationships, and it would allow parents living on a single income to split the income for tax purposes. None of this might have been known had that poll not been published. Subsequent polls, published a day or two before the election, would have left little time to give United Future the same scrutiny.

In the event, the party survived the examination, winning at the election almost the same share of the vote that DigiPoll had discovered the previous weekend. Perhaps the moderation and common sense of Mr Dunne on television outweighed any misgivings about a religious party in the minds of his intending voters. Or it might be that revelations of the party's character drove many of those voters away and replaced them with a Christian constituency of remarkably similar size.

It would not be the first time religious politics has approached this degree of success. At the first MMP election, the Christian Coalition, an alliance of the Christian Democrats and the more conservative Christian Heritage Party, came achingly close to the 5 per cent threshold for seats in Parliament. Had it won seats then it might now be in the position of Act, which just cleared the threshold that year.

It may be a blessing for all concerned that religious politics has waited this long to enter Parliament. The Christian Coalition has split and its more moderate and tolerant wing has come to a share of power. Labour must now keep Mr Dunne's people on side if the Government is not to become hostage to the Greens in its second term.

We read that the prospect of dealing with United Future is worrying Labour's women and gay members. The reason, probably, is that United Future would like to preserve a distinction for traditional marriage that has been somewhat lost in the law regarding divisions of household property. But that is a law in need of further attention from the point of view of de facto couples, too.

For the most part the newly arrived party's interests and priorities are a reminder of some values that have been rather lost in debate lately. Two-parent families are preferable to one, and a great deal of poverty, poor education, unemployment and crime might be alleviated if the next generation made better personal decisions than many of their parents have done. It will be refreshing to have a party prepared to assert some home truths and to balance the prevailing orthodoxies. The broader the debate, the better.

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