Party time: Complete faith in the winds of change

By WARREN GAMBLE

The driver sees the sign crumpled on a West Auckland grass verge. Half of Jim Anderton's face stares at the sky.

"Poor old Jim," says the driver. "Smashed to pieces."

The driver is Laila Harre, the Alliance leader fighting for her own and her party's political life after the damaging split with Anderton this year.

Her remark comes with a smile, no detectable bitterness. The sign is in her territory out west, but she thinks the cause of its downfall is more likely Auckland's destructive winds rather than any political sabotage.

Further on, behind the sprawling Waikumete Cemetery, she is pulled over at a police checkpoint. A brief moment of worry as she searches for her licence, relief when she finds it tucked away in her wallet.

Neither officer nor candidate refers to politics; she doesn't, she says, want any Peter Doone comparisons.

Harre has already put in a full morning, starting with constituency work, then a lengthy session at Radio Tarana, the Hindi radio station.

By the end of it she has won over her Pakistani and Indian interviewers from the the Shakti Asian Women's Centre and the Bhartiya Samaj community support group.

She convinces the support group to help doorknock this weekend in the Waitakere electorate she must win to keep the Alliance in Parliament.

Fortified by a takeaway soy latte, she's off back to the electorate, which stretches from Piha's black sands to bustling suburban Henderson.

She has to beat Labour's trade union organiser candidate, Lynne Pillay, and National MP Marie Hasler in the redrawn seat, which is comfortably Labour on paper.

Driving past one of her billboards, the leather-jacketed portrait filched by admiring teenage boys in Christchurch, she dismisses any political sex symbol talk: "It's embarrassing and silly."

At Glenmall in Glen Eden, the sign-destroying winds crank up and the heavens open at the first of three meet-and-greets.

The weather, says Harre, has made campaigning difficult, undermining her street corner speech plans.

Instead, she is doing the shopping centre beat, handing out pamphlets, talking crime, genetic engineering, and occasionally dealing with the J-word.

"What have you done to Jim Anderton?" asked one elderly man uncritically. "Nothing. Jim is quite capable of doing it to himself," she replies.

Among the outright refusals and approvals, or the eyes-straight-ahead brigade, many say they will at least think about her candidacy.

It's a start, but there is not much time to change minds.

At the Henderson shops, Harre gets family support from her father, John, and 9-year-old half-sister Sophia, who comes up with the savvy tactic of handing out stickers to holidaying schoolchildren.

Harre competes for attention with a singing, dancing Christian youth group.

She has her own faith that she can pull off an improbable win.

Asked if she has thought about what she will be doing after July 27 she says: "Yeah. Going to Parliament. It's true, I haven't got any other plans."

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