A bumpy ride on the road to power

By Colin James

The Greens stole the campaign. Written off a year ago, struggling all year to break 2 per cent, they now look likely to be back in Parliament in greater numbers.

In part, this was others' doing. The genetically modified foods scare was a godsend. Helen Clark, needing an insurance policy, signalled loudly to her supporters that Greens co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons should have the Coromandel electorate seat. Jenny Shipley blundered into Coromandel and gave the green bus another shove.

But it is also the Greens' doing. They made the running on GM foods and unearthed other scandals. They put a big effort into Coromandel. Co-leader Rod Donald is an instinctive, inventive and engaging campaigner. Ms Fitzsimons is seriously nice - demonising her, as National tried to do, was implausible.

Mrs Shipley's panicky attempt to squash the Greens back into their muesli box was understandable. National needed to void Labour's insurance policy, and holding Coromandel is crucial to National's re-election chances. But any half-alert National strategist would have doused this potential hotspot months ago.

The turning of Coromandel into a nationally recognised serious Green prospect was the turning point in the campaign. The left suddenly had the makings of a cushion. The right bandwagon began to lose oomph.

But who was driving this bandwagon? Not National, which has slid in polls all year - and during the campaign.

In part, this is the result of five years of National Governments containing and depending on misfits, turncoats and incompetents, a sluggish economy and a yearning for at least a "correction" (as is said in the money markets after a long bull run) to Rogernomics. Mrs Shipley was on a hiding when she took office two years ago.

But National also made its own hurdles. It began to provide the "correction" this year, but too late and too little. It made easily avoidable political mistakes. It failed to wield to the full its potent centre-seeking weapon, the rising thirty-somethings known as the "brat pack."

The campaign has shown that weapon needs sharpening. Brat pack leader Bill English is National's rising star. But he lacks bite in close-quarters electioneering, and is no match for Michael Cullen in debate. For the brat pack, it will be back to school even if National wins.

This soft-focused National Party, its strategists not always in unison, ran a divergent campaign. Half of it was negative, but never quite going for Labour's jugular, not even this week on tax. Half of it was positive, but without the 2000 vision Mrs Shipley kept claiming but never convincingly articulated.

It lacked a unifying slogan. The campaign bus invited us to "value your country" - but did anyone notice? The campaign took no risks until Coromandel, and so lacked conversion power, which is what campaigns are supposed to be about.

So the right's bandwagon was driven by Richard Prebble. Act drew on Australian skills for a hard-sell, product-focused campaign - "one country" on the treaty issue, lock up the crims, prod the beneficiaries out to work.

Act was the brilliant star turn of the first half of the campaign, for a time sucking social conservative votes out of Labour - although probably costing Mr Prebble votes in liberal Wellington Central.

But Act also wants low tax, deregulation, asset sales and more private education and health delivery - all things "one country" middling voters don't like. The wave broke mid-campaign when Act reminded them of this side of its personality.

Before the next election Act needs to decide whether it is a libertarian right party, flanking a centre-seeking National, or a populist party, inheritor of Winston Peters' angries and hollowing out Labour.

For NZ First the campaign has been disastrous. If it limps back into Parliament, it will be a fractious fragment.

Mr Peters risks three humiliations tomorrow - losing Tauranga, dropping below 5 per cent, and either depending on a hostile Tutekawa Wyllie for his seat in Parliament or, if Mr Wyllie is defeated, disappearing altogether.

Labour's flank partner, the Alliance, has run a sound campaign. "Slim Jim," as Mr Anderton has taken to calling himself after the success of his new diet, was convincing in debates and almost always supported Labour - a rose of reason, even when Labour tramped over Alliance sensitivities with a new slogan alleging that only a party vote for Labour could change the Government.

The Alliance's advertising messages were clear and product-focused. On campaigning alone, the Alliance deserves to increase its 1996 vote.

But the beneficiary has been Labour, whose interest the Alliance was bound to serve or risk letting National back in. Labour's campaign, like National's, was riskless - a risky gambit, as it turned out.

Labour's strategists failed to realise until late that they were stacking up electorate support when it is the party vote that decides elections.

The advertising was mostly gapingly vacuous, given product focus only very late. The "future is with Labour" slogan was empty of content. Helen Clark left "vision" until her campaign opening, too late to embed it in voters' minds - so she has run on negatives and, as a result, left herself hostage to a huge heap of unfulfillable implied promises.

So if Labour wins, it will be largely by default. Ahead by wide margins for most of three years, it had largely squandered its lead by the campaign opening.

A win tomorrow would be the electorate voting National out more than voting Labour in.

Helen Clark has yet to construct a convincing social democratic response to the open economy on which a long-term Labour government might be founded.

But she has come on. In this campaign, the bluestocking of yore began to enjoy mixing with the plebs. Stand by for the next episode in her evolution if she becomes Prime Minister.

Amid the multitude of smaller battles Labour's Tauranga candidate, Margaret Wilson, is the standout. She has shown what a high-profile political pro can do in a "hopeless" seat, building the party vote to respectability and taking Katherine O'Regan to the wire.

If Winston Peters is not in the next Parliament, it will be in great part Professor Wilson's doing.