John Roughan: With Helen and Jim we've likely seen nothing yet

Tiesday's announcement was quite a catharsis. Sooner rather than later, just six weeks from tonight, the weight will lift from Helen Clark's shoulders and we may begin to discover what she really means to do with her time in the sun.

Possibly she won't know herself until the election is over. Possibly she, too, now wants to find out sooner rather than later.

David Lange told her biographer, Brian Edwards, last year: "She actually has an agenda. I don't know the detail of that agenda today, but it will be there and it will be still maturing."

For three years her Government has had just one item on its agenda. It was etched in blood, underlined three times and circled. It read: Get re-elected.

It's hard to overstate the weight of history that makes the item imperative. At about this stage in the life of the last Labour Government I came upon one of its ministers, Stan Rodger, sitting in a contemplative mood at the back of a party gathering.

The 1987 election was imminent and the polls gave them every reason to be buoyant, but he was pensive. Twice in the lifetime of most of those present the party had come into office only to be voted out after a single term. It had been 41 years since a Labour Government was last re-elected.

He shuddered to think what would happen if it was not returned that year. He really feared the party would not survive.

So probably did MPs like Michael Cullen and Helen Clark, who disapproved deeply of the direction the Cabinet had taken but kept quiet for the sake of the party.

Well, it won that year, handsomely. It was the first re-elected Labour Government since 1946 and the first of any Government since 1951 to increase its majority.

But having survived three years of furious economic change without "screwing up again", as Mike Moore used to put it, they screwed up the second term, with a vengeance.

The sharemarket crashed and Roger Douglas produced another batch of reforms, featuring a flat tax rate. Lange pulled the plug and the Government blew apart. The party spent the next decade in opposition, trying to expunge its memory of the fourth Labour Government and all its works.

Helen Clark came to power invoking the third Labour Government, reaching for a torch dropped in 1975. That is a long time to have waited. The demons must be doubly worse for those who have blotted Rogernomics from their record.

But 1975 will be etched deeply in their psyche. For this Labour generation 1975 was a loss of innocence. They had grown up in the 1960s, marched against anything illiberal or militaristic, ridiculed Holyoake and greeted the election of Norman Kirk as a national awakening. They had no idea how conservative the country remained.

Three years later the workers deserted to Muldoon and young Labourites were devastated. Some, like Douglas and Richard Prebble, revised their ideas. Others such as Jim Anderton and Margaret Wilson, hunkered down and waited for another day.

They waited not so much for an election day as re-election day. Election, they knew, came to Labour from time to time, usually after long periods of National rule, and usually briefly. It was re-election they needed, to restore credibility to the left.

When finally they got the chance, after 15 years of rightward reform, they did not need to veer far left to make an impression - just far enough to remove some unpopular elements of the reforms but nothing that would blow the budget or raise the spectres that defeated first-term Labour Governments previously.

So with a mixture of extreme political caution and minimal change, they are six weeks away from the moment they have awaited for 27 years: Re-election of a left-leaning Government. With polls high, the Budget passed and other decisions awaiting the election result, they have decided to wait no longer.

As early as July 27 the burden of history should lift. It will be interesting to see what happens then.

They might be surprised by a sense of release and it might not be too long afterwards that they find a new sense of purpose.

They will finally look past the first item on the agenda.

Clark, Anderton, Wilson and others did not go into politics all those years ago to be endlessly re-elected. They had a sense of mission once and it could return the moment the one-term syndrome is dispelled.

Whatever that mission might be, we will hear little of it from an election campaign naturally promoting little more than the programme that has not troubled the electorate so far.

When Labour looks around, post election, for something to do with the power it sought so long, what might it see?

Too much dangerous fun, for one thing. Too many hotel gaming machines, too much youthful drinking, far too much smoking in bars. With the Greens in tow the next Government could also see too many cars, too much cheap, fossil-fuelled energy, far too much fat in the national diet.

Well, it could be worse. The Government could lose its fiscal head to the health, welfare and education lobbies that have been strangely quiescent since National departed. It could appoint a tame Governor to the Reserve Bank and order short-term comfort at a price in inflation to be paid when the Government has gone.

Whatever the agenda, I suspect we have seen nothing yet.

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