KEY POINTS:
The Prime Minister says she decided both the election date and the day she would announce it several weeks ago. To borrow a phrase she has used frequently of late to refer to the predicament of her beleaguered, suspended Minister of Foreign Affairs, we are bound to take her word as an honourable member on that.
Certainly the timing makes sense. During the passage of those several weeks, Labour has begun to claw back National's lead in the opinion polls, enabling Clark to avoid calling an election while her party was looking like dog tucker.
In recent days, however, revelations in the Winston Peters affair have rather tarnished Labour's image. Owen Glenn, who in his evidence to the Privileges Committee was nothing if not plausible, has described the PM as self-serving and her deputy as a bully and has depicted the party president, Mike Williams, as a gauche opportunist. Any advantage that Clark saw in suspending sentence on Peters has been quickly evaporating in the heat of the hearing as Labour committee members tried to suggest that Glenn might not have actually been speaking to Peters.
It is now more than possible that Clark can avoid making any decision at all about the benighted NZ First leader; and if she does dismiss him, it will no longer be a political upheaval but rather a small punctuation mark at the end of what has seemed a never-ending story.
The delay has given National an amount of breathing space that it must have relished. A Government's political opponents may deride it with impunity during a term of office, but during an election campaign an Opposition's entitlement to seek an electoral mandate faces detailed public scrutiny. Up to now, National has escaped that, dodging questions about policy and fudging telling slips of the tongue by other MPs - notably the loose-lipped suggestion by transport spokesman Maurice Williamson that Auckland commuters could find their tax cuts swallowed up by road tolls - by saying that all would be revealed when the time came. The time has come. The phony campaign is over and it's time for the real one.
The public will welcome that, not least because everyone is sick and tired of the Peters sideshow. We may never know whether Glenn's or Peters' version of the donation affair is the correct one but that long ago ceased being the point. Peters did enough in the committee room on Wednesday evening to muddy the water around Glenn's testimony. But key matters remain clear: the party failed to report donations that the law required them to report; the leader failed adequately to check whether allegations of funding irregularities had any merit before branding them baseless lies and slanders; and the champion of accountability conspicuously refused to be called to account. His evasions and prevarications may yet save his skin in the legal processes that have been set in train, but the electorate can, and surely will, decide that he has strutted and fretted his hour upon the stage and should be heard no more.
Clark has some work to do to gain the trust that, as she says, will be the central issue of this campaign. So, it must be said, has John Key. Whether he likes it or not, all the public knows about him at the moment is that he is not Helen Clark. That may be enough to get him the keys to the Beehive's ninth floor. But it would be a matter of regret if that were the case. National must show why it deserves to govern, and the voters must demand a convincing argument. The idea that "it is time to give the other crowd a go" is no basis on which to decide who will steer the country through the choppy seas that lie ahead.
