KEY POINTS:
The election next weekend seems to have been a long time coming. Even when Helen Clark announced the date on September 12, many people were already punch-drunk from months of shadow-boxing.
National was struggling not to look smug over poll ratings that suggested it could govern alone, and Labour looked destined for the kind of hiding National took in 2002.
In the subsequent seven weeks, the poll gap has narrowed, as it typically does during election campaigns. And when the number of undecided voters around one in eight and the margin for error are taken into account, the result is far from a foregone conclusion.
Still, the smart money would be on a change of Government. National could gain a parliamentary majority with the support of its pledged support parties, United Future and Act. Labour's chance to keep the Treasury benches, by contrast, will depend on whether it can reconcile the competing demands of several partners.
To have a real shot at cobbling together a majority, Labour would need the support of NZ First, an option unlikely to be available since the polls strongly point to extinction both of the party and its turbulent leader, Winston Peters. He cannot be ruled out entirely; history shows that if anyone can rise from a political deathbed he can. But if that happens, Helen Clark will have to ask herself whether she can - or should - work with him again.
For no matter how much Peters harrumphs and blusters, the donations fiasco has revealed him to be both a hypocrite and a man whose doubletalk has been hard to distinguish from calculated deceit. Clark would need to ask herself whether she should rely, like every administration in the MMP era, on such a perverse dissembler to keep her on the ninth floor of the Beehive. She may believe that she has a political mission to fulfil and that it is fair to resort to any expedient within the rules that allows her to do that. But a real leader knows when the prize is not worth the price.
In the end, Clark may not face that choice, since Peters will probably be consigned to the oblivion he so richly deserves. But she also faces the question of whether a minority Government she leads would have a legitimate claim to power. If Labour were to win significantly fewer party votes than National and yet assemble a ramshackle coalition with the Greens, the Maori Party and the Progressives, Clark could end up with a constitutional hold on power to which it had no moral entitlement. A Government so formed would risk being seen as cynically corrupting the intentions of MMP, which could lead to a regrettable backlash against proportional representation. And a Government whose very existence runs counter to the plainly expressed will of the people is not likely to go down very well in the country that invented the concept of the fair go.
The official campaign has not offered voters much in the way of persuasive material. Labour has struggled to profit from some of National's more egregious blunders, such as Lockwood Smith's silly comment about the relative hand sizes of Asian fruit pickers, because they seemed trivial in the light of the major issues. Clark's formidable political skills have been somewhat blunted by the dire economic predictions, and her normally good judgment looked suspect when she failed to keep a tight leash on her party president, Mike Williams, whose "neutron bomb" about John Key's alleged involvement in a money-market scam turned out to be a damp squib and wrong. Key, meanwhile, appears not to have suffered as much as he should have over his vague recollection of his Tranz Rail shareholdings. All in all, he has belied his political inexperience by remaining remorselessly on message.
And so, with a week to go, the polls suggest there is a mood for change. But the incoming Government needs to have a clear and unequivocal mandate. The crisis enveloping global financial systems will call for strong leadership from decision-makers untrammelled by the need to pander to the competing desires of coalition partners. The worst thing that voters could do on Saturday is to try to second-guess the main party leaders with so-called strategic voting.
We need a clear result to strengthen the hand on the tiller in the stormy seas ahead.
