The week ahead: Voters grasp party vote, but want a say on the issues too

By COLIN JAMES

I reckon people are just getting the hang of it: the party vote's the important one," said the man at the airport car park on Thursday. He and his friends have figured out they don't want small parties mucking a government around.

Then he added: "Law and order and education are the two big issues. And GE. I'm a bit worried about those two-headed salmon. I think that might decide how I vote."

Those contradictory statements from the one person sum up the muddled directions of the vote-drivers in the election.

Genetic modification was the focus of the campaign's first week: Jeanette Fitzsimons growling at Helen Clark; Clark snapping back.

Polls and focus groups do not put GM as voters' No 1 issue. But its prominence in the first week of the campaign posed a problem for Bill English: how to get air time for the issues he thinks he can score on if GM is blotting them out.

National alleges its polling is showing National ahead of Labour on crime and level and rising on education. So this week English, after seeking in the first week to establish himself as the family man and man of the people, is going more negative on those issues.

In fact, crime has begun to get media attention, helped by a potentially soft attempted murder sentence and the shooting of a policeman. Act relaunched its policy on Thursday and National made a big play of it on Saturday at its conference. Its message in brief: too few police and Labour's bungled new sentencing law.

But English has a bigger mountain to climb: leadership. That's where Clark beats him in spades, even on National's own tracking polls. So yesterday he went hard on Helen Clark's bogus signatures, her staff's destruction of evidence and her role in the police investigation.

His message: a Prime Minister must have unimpeachable integrity. His advantage: no one has questioned his integrity.

Will the voters listen? English yesterday volunteered that the painting signatures are a small issue in themselves, as voters seem also to think. Whether he can this week turn the police report into an integrity issue voters hook into will be a test of his campaign.

Certainly, Clark in the shopping malls is a leader in full command and connecting with her people. This once wallflower-shy bluestocking plunges into crowds with evident enjoyment, eyes alight, smile on full power and some quick, bright words. "I'm a groupie," declared one middle-aged woman to me, having left a "good coffee" to follow her. "She's lovely, she's lovely," said her husband, smitten.

What? Helen of Helengrad, lovely? And charming and approachable and doing small talk? This is not in National's script. Her walkabouts are a cross between a royal progress and a sports star's autograph session.

Hard to counter, that, and Clark is promising a lot more of it. Not that English doesn't connect. His walkabouts are a strong point, too. He is the most accessible, one-of-us National leader in a long while.

But now he needs to show he can run the show, too. Voters need to see more of the straight-from-the-shoulder English in the TV3 leaders debate and the inspirational English at National's conference yesterday.

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