KEY POINTS:
John Key's bloody time in the Elders IXL war zone has given him the perfect grounding to combat Labour's smear campaigns. Key deliberately got in front of Labour's parliamentary innuendoes by telling the Herald about the part he played helping the Serious Fraud Office to ping his former boss' role in the Equiticorp H fee fraud.
By drawing out his opponents before they even noticed, Key was using the type of classic defensive move that would be natural to a high-stakes foreign exchange player.
And by defusing any attempt by Cabinet Minister Trevor Mallard to link him to the sham foreign exchange deals that Elders Merchant Finance set up to funnel A$66.5 million to Equiticorp boss Allan Hawkins, Key set the bar higher for the Government's attack dogs.
He had left the company three months before his successor, Paul Richards, put the foreign exchange deals in motion.
If they are to ram home an allegation implicating Key in the H fee fraud, Labour will now need to produce cast-iron evidence - not simply a guilt by association smear. Right now the public sympathy is running with Key.
Labour's attempt to undermine him over his position on Iraq came a cropper when news broke that Air New Zealand had ferried Australian troops to the Middle East.
Its attempt to capitalise on the inconsistencies on his use of different company and electoral addresses hit a wall when Key produced a letter from Parliament's Clerk of the House ruling that there was nothing untoward.
Similarly, Labour's attempt to blacken him by his business links to two architects who put their company into voluntary liquidation because of their exposure to three leaky homes cases has failed to draw blood.
Nevertheless, Key would be wise to do a clean-sheet exercise on all his business links. He sold all his New Zealand company shares - such as Telecom - to avoid the potential for conflicts of interest when debating policy changes that might affect share values. His dairy farm has also been sold.
After the furore over architects Colin Leuschke and Brian Cocker, he is now reviewing his membership in their joint company Earl of Auckland.
It's easy to see why Key would have been attracted to a job in the Elders machine. John Elliott, the charismatic former Liberal Party president and boss of Elders IXL, cut a swashbuckling figure when he came to Wellington in the mid-80s to launch its New Zealand offshoot.
He was feted at a big party at Wellington's Skyline restaurant where the champagne and pretty women ran free. For the young Key, who went on to head Elders foreign exchange operations in New Zealand, it would have been a wonderfully edgy time.
Key was incredibly lucky to have resigned from Elders before his boss, finance director Ken Jarrett, blew into town to put pressure on Richards to do a "bizarre" deal.
Asked what he would have done had he been the one to face Jarrett's squeeze on him, Key says he would "like to think I would have refused".
Irrespective of his story that he simply clocked up $10 million profits a year as a successful boss of Elders forex operations, there would have been pressures.
To get an insight into life inside Elders, you need look no further than Jarrett. While Key plays down the 1980s excesses, his former boss has since been frank about life at Elders under Elliott's swashbuckling days.
"It was almost a sport to try and go as close to the edge as possible without going over," he said in an interview for the Australian Institute of Company Directors magazine. "Executives in Elders were completely absorbed in the company and everything else was secondary. There was this view that if lawyers advised you that something was okay then it was okay and it was within the rules of the game that you were playing."
Jarrett described the situation inside Elders as like a "war-zone mentality" - which is the unvarnished truth. Also unvarnished is the lifestyle of forex dealers in the 1980s.
After the furore over Australian Labor leader Kevin Rudd's New York outing to a lap-dancing club, Key admitted that 20 years ago he had visited strip clubs - "this was banking". Unlike Rudd, Key remembers the details. It's that sort of difference that Labour on this side of the Tasman will need to factor in before its next foray.
