Mammoth task to counter Cup power

John Key will be rubbing shoulders with several high-profile visitors during the World Cup. Photo / Getty Images

The worry is not the elephant in the room that no one mentions; the problem is the mammoth soon to plonk itself in the middle of the road and unintentionally block anything trying to bypass it.

Tomorrow is the start of the 100-day countdown to election day in late November. But the only countdown that counts for most people right now is the countdown to the start of the Rugby World Cup.

The tournament will fill 46 of those 100 pre-election days. It ends a month before voters go to the polls.

Party strategists are agreed on one thing. Politics will be taking a back seat during the Cup. Party campaigning will continue unaffected with door-knocking, direct mailouts and telephone canvassing, while leaders will probably still get coverage in local media when they visit provincial centres.

But the feeling is major news organisations will be preoccupied with the Cup and associated stories.

This poses obvious problems for just about every party in terms of releasing policy and hammering key messages.

The exception is National which - given its lead in the polls - stands to benefit from any politics free-zone which helps maintain the status quo.

John Key will be rubbing shoulders with several high-profile international visitors - political and non-political - during the tournament, so National's opponents will view the Cup as an extension of National's campaign, rather than an interruption.

Other party leaders trying to gain traction with voters during that period will be wasting their time.

Anyone who does manage to gain traction in the three weeks left before the Cup begins will probably lose it during the following seven-week hiatus.

Thus the quandary for party strategists: release policy now and see it swallowed up by the political black hole which is the Cup, or hold off until after the tournament for the official four-week election campaign and watch those policies being swamped in the rush.

The only answer is to do a bit of both.

The Greens are seeking to gain voters' attention with three advance announcements listing their priorities for the next three years - lifting 100,000 children out of poverty, cleaning up New Zealand's rivers and the promotion of "green" jobs.

Act's answer is to have Don Brash delivering six major speeches before the Cup - the first being on Act's principles last Sunday.

The worry for smaller parties is that election campaigns are frenetic affairs often dominated by relatively trivial matters - rather than policy. As it is, minor parties struggle to get a look-in. They have the additional handicap of being (again) shut out of the televised debates between the Labour and National leaders.

As the major alternative governing party, Labour can rely on getting reasonable media coverage of its policies.

It will unveil a couple of those during the Cup. But they will not be any of its major ones. Labour has an awful lot of minds that it needs to change to make a fight of it. But it recognises that the Rugby World Cup will not provide the atmosphere conducive for doing so.