The week ahead: Greens reveal true, but damaging, colours

By COLIN JAMES

The Greens are now a full-on Opposition party. Their immediate and uncritical exploitation of Nicky Hager's conspiracy theory about an unproven GM contamination and cover-up was not the act of a party angling to work with Helen Clark after the election.

Now that they may well have got what they wanted - the reduction of Labour's support to the point where it will not be able (with Jim Anderton) to govern alone - the task for the Greens in the next two weeks is to restore credibility as a constructive partner. Without Labour, the Greens' programme is compost.

Jeanette Fitzsimons and Helen Clark have not spoken since Ms Fitzsimons' attack. But feelers are going out and their past stock of mutual goodwill and respect provides a basis to repair the damage - if the Greens get out of Opposition mode.

But are Labour's majority hopes repairable after the corn scare?

In any complex story there is both the story and the story about the story.

The actual corn story - officials' misunderstanding of the difference between statistical probability and actual incidence - probably runs for Labour and against the Greens for making one allegation too many.

But that is subtle and difficult to explain. So the story about the story - the uncritically shock-horror tone of much initial media coverage, set by TV3's nasty ambush of Helen Clark - is likely to have played much more strongly in voters' minds. Several party tracking polls last week marked Labour down - briefly to around 40 per cent.

There is rough justice in this. Helen Clark publicly made the Greens' stand on GM a factor in the timing of an election called to ride good polls to a majority. An October election might well have been less contaminated by GM.

Now GM has escaped from containment and has mutated into a majority-threatening organism. And the serene Helen Clark of the billboards has mutated into a ratty leader under pressure.

How does she repair the damage? Labour's billboards and advertising are to change tack this week. My guess is that it will try to scare voters off small parties with the spectre of an anarchic and unmanageable Parliament.

Meanwhile down on the farm - sorry, hustings - Bill English has absorbed pressure that would flatten most people. He has been gravity-defyingly chipper as his party's polls have slid and slid. In fact, he has gained from the experience: at last he is hungry.

If he can only get himself heard, he will tell voters this week that he can handle pressure better than his opponent.

And he might just be about to get some help.

Last night's TV One poll confirmed the direction of the previous week's polls and showed the Government below a majority. If National supporters who have been planning to vote Labour to stop the Greens figure that ploy now can't work, they might cross back home.

That is if they don't go to Act or New Zealand First. To capture them, National will this week keep pushing where it has found it has the jump on Labour: law and order, followed closely by education.

* ColinJames@synapsis.co.nz

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