The week ahead: Flurry of launches abound in tactics

By COLIN JAMES

You know it's MMP when much of the campaign talk is about tactics.

And you know it is MMP when the party "launches" are a jumble sale compared with the orderly processions of yesteryear: governing party Monday evening, main opposition party Tuesday, No 3 Wednesday and on down the line.

Micro-party United Future launched on Saturday afternoon, before the biggies who, inexplicably in underdog National's case, insisted on cancelling each other out yesterday.

United's Peter Dunne, liberal centrist turned "family values" advocate in deference to his merger with the sect-ish Christians who were Future New Zealand - he is the voice of reason, they contribute votes, candidates and money - wants notice as a "middle" party to stabilise a system that has broken two small coalition parties already.

But Saturday was late. Act launched - or did it? - at Mt Eden Prison on June 16, Winston Peters on June 17, Jim Anderton on June 23 and the Alliance four hours before Dunne. You might even say the Greens got away first, using their Queen's Birthday Weekend conference as a launchpad for a gratuitously early election it helped excuse.

Then all parties "opened" on television and radio on Friday and Saturday. Act will (re)launch next Sunday.

This week there will be a torrent of policy, as parties seek to position themselves: National on health today, for example; Labour on "food" (meaning genetic modification).

And the leaders will get out on the road (business-as-usual Helen Clark in Invercargill today, a gutsy and improving Bill English in South Auckland). The aim: lots of events and a range of people to demonstrate "reach". It's not the people they meet who count. It is the images on the 6pm news and the platforms to give policy points a news backdrop.

But policy is pointless if voters don't understand the tactics needed to get the policy. So expect also a determined push this week - and through the rest of the campaign - to get those tactical messages across. That has been central to all the launches.

Labour's tactical message is simple: give the Government (including Anderton) a majority. Because this is such a naked grab for power, Clark is putting on a show of humility: it is, if you believe her, every day a "privilege to serve".

Anderton is also pushing for a Government majority because he is part of it. Why bother backing him, if he is just part of Clark's team? He says he is needed to make Labour think twice before acting.

Actually, says the Alliance, it was Laila Harre who made Labour think twice. Harre ran a nicely constructed line on Saturday: Labour's embrace of National converts, whom (Harre says) it must then keep sweet, requires Labour supporters who want a Labour programme on health and education to vote her back in.

That has a ring of truth: without the Alliance to push the hitherto quiescent Labour left's case, that left might get more uppity. (Though there are the "social justice" Greens.)

Then there is National. "Vote for what you believe in," English has pleaded, hoping enough people believe in National. To which Act essentially will this week add the reverse of the Alliance message: to get what Nationalists truly believe in, they will need to vote Act.

And Peters? Vote him to stop the Greens, he says.

That's tactics. That's MMP.