Editorial: Smaller parties all the go

With the election campaign now well in to its third and penultimate week, the most important contest has become that between the minor parties. One or more of them are now in contention to make - or break - the next Government. For the first two weeks of the campaign the Green Party was the only one that looked likely to figure significantly in the outcome. But that has changed.

Our latest weekly poll, published today, finds that New Zealand First has risen to 8.3 per cent, the second week in succession that it has added two percentage points to its tally. If it can maintain that momentum to election day, Winston Peters' party could end up with more than 10 per cent of the vote and a dozen or more seats in Parliament.

The Greens have also risen again, from 10.1 per cent last week to 11.3 per cent now. But they might have expected a greater lift from a poll which captures the full impact of the "Corngate" affair. The Herald-DigiPoll survey was taken after the Government responded with extensive briefings on the testing of the corn and shifted the debate to the ethics of 3 News, which had surprised the Prime Minister with the Nicky Hager disclosures.

Whatever the state of the corn, or the fairness of the channel's treatment of Helen Clark, Labour appears to have suffered. It has fallen more than a point since last week, continuing a slide from its high of 52.1 per cent in the week before the campaign began. Its loss this week is much less than the three points it shed last week in the wake of the police report on "Paintergate", but a trend has set in.

Unless Labour can arrest the trend in the last week of the campaign it will have no hope of finishing with the clear majority it so recently expected. At 46.7 per cent in today's DigiPoll sample, Labour is already in need of allies. The more parties that clear the 5 per cent threshold or win an electorate, the higher the percentage Labour will need in order to be awarded more than half the seats. The Greens, NZ First and Act are all over the threshold this week, as they were last week, and two others, Jim Anderton's Progressive Coalition and Peter Dunne's United Future, are likely to win an electorate.

Mr Dunne, on the strength of his showing in this week's TVNZ debate, could well have a companion in the next Parliament. He and Mr Anderton, with whatever additional seats they could muster, would be preferable as coalition partners for Labour than either NZ First or the Greens. It will be interesting to see whether Helen Clark tries to give Mr Dunne a hand up, as National used to do when it did not stand against him in his electorate.

Of course none of this jockeying for minor party support would be happening if National was performing as a major party should. National has dropped another three points in today's poll, standing at just 23.1 per cent, a dismal showing by any previous standard of the two main parties. One or other of the two parties has sometimes fallen well below 30 per cent but not as low as this, and not in the midst of an election campaign.

Instead of mounting a concerted campaign on economic improvement (generate growth and most other problems wither), National has campaigned on crime, treaty claims and the like. The effect has been to make National sound like Act and NZ First and if it falls any further it will be polling like them, too.

Before the campaign started conventional wisdom held that our politics were reverting to the two-party type. The campaign has put paid to that. The smaller parties are making the most of their exposure and more than one of them now looks likely to figure in the disposition of power.

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