Editorial: National needs to get Act together

Like it or not, we now have an electoral system that virtually ensures no party can govern alone. Curiously, only one of the two major parties appears to realise the fact. Labour has clearly made a strategic decision at this stage of the election campaign to help the Green Party, which, on recent polling, might struggle to win enough of the party vote to qualify for seats in the next Parliament. Helen Clark pointedly invited Jeanette Fitzsimons to accompany her on a campaign event in Auckland last week, and the Greens co-leader needed no second bidding.

Contrast Labour's gesture to the Greens with National's attitude to Act. Both smaller parties sit to the extreme of their larger ally; both can be counted certain to add to its prospects of forming a government if the small party makes it back into Parliament. In fact, among all parties contesting this election, Act is National's only unequivocal supporter; Labour can also count on "Jim Anderton's Progressives" for one or two supporting votes. And as the polls stand, Act is in considerably greater danger than the Greens of parliamentary oblivion.

Yet at almost the same time Helen Clark was extending a helping hand to her Green counterpart last week, the National Party was taking steps to see that its name no longer appeared on an Act billboard. Admittedly, Act's billboard was in the wrong. Not only did it contravene a legal prohibition on unauthorised party advertising, but it was misleading National voters and damaging to that party by seeking the party votes of people who would vote National in their electorate. But all minor parties play that misleading game one way or another. They rely on the continuing widespread ignorance of the fact that of the two votes now offered to us, it is the party vote, and the party vote alone, that decides the strength of each party in the new Parliament. Even parties that survive on their leader's electorate vote look to the nationwide vote for additional seats.

Act's shameless play for the party votes of National supporters was a tactic made more necessary by the party's lack of a "lifeboat" electorate. Unlike Winston Peters' party, Peter Dunne's United Future and Mr Anderton's two-man band, Act has no Tauranga, Ohariu-Belmont or Wigram to ensure its survival. That is a predicament National could have averted by giving Act an uncontested run at a safe National seat, as it once did for Mr Dunne, to be rewarded with his parliamentary support. Why, it must be wondered, has the party steadfastly refused to do the same for Act? Is it simply that the big parties find it easier and politically safer to deal with centrist parties than with purists on their side? Undoubtedly they do, but Labour has not snubbed parties to its left in quite the way that National has cold-shouldered Act.

National's behaviour might be understandable if it had alternatives, but it does not. It might quietly contemplate a post-election deal with United Future or New Zealand First or both. But given a choice, Mr Dunne would seem likely to continue his more recent association with Labour and Mr Peters is an unreliable prospect at the best of times. He is talking this time of giving neither main party the kind of assured support that would allow it to form a government, and he probably means it. Labour has listened to him and become more determined to ensure the election leaves it with alternative sources of support. National ought to be doing the same. Elections in this country are no longer a simple matter of finishing first; they have become as much a test of co-operative politics, too. On that score National needs to pick up its Act.