KEY POINTS:
Great longevity in politics can be a double-edged sword at the ballot box. The Prime Minister, Helen Clark, and her deputy, Michael Cullen, have 27 years of service each in Parliament and face a National leader of relative political inexperience in John Key, elected six years ago. The Labour leadership, with Foreign Minister Winston Peters, who also has 27 years but in two stretches, now represent the grandees of our politics. Time is simultaneously the best and worst thing going for them as they move towards a likely November election.
When Helen Clark entered Parliament in 1981, she might have glanced around with impatience at the greybeard veterans of the House, MPs such as Robert Muldoon. Men of vast experience, they turned out to be in their last throes in power, either through retirement or the 1984 electoral defeat that ushered in the fourth Labour Government. The Opposition leader who tipped them out was David Lange, who when he took the Treasury benches had been an MP for just seven years, and Labour Party leader for not quite two.
John Key is no David Lange, and Helen Clark is no Robert Muldoon. Yet the issue of experience against new blood is one that will echo through 2008. Our election will in one sense fall within the shadow of the United States presidential campaign, also ending in November. The Republican, John McCain, will be the veteran in all senses of the word against either of two Democrats with comparatively light senatorial service.
Hillary Clinton claims 35 years of public service, including time as the Arkansas governor's wife, eight years of White House experience as First Lady, and her eight years in the Senate. Yet her "executive" role was one without portfolio, her achievements now under debate. Barack Obama is bringing up four years in the Senate, preceded by eight years as a state senator in Illinois. It is a relatively light resume, but hardly that of a political novice.
Mr McCain, at 71, and with eight years in the House and 22 in the Senate, surpasses the Democrats and, in our context, the New Zealand trio for his ability to hang in there. He is unashamedly hawking his durability and Mrs Clinton is talking hers up. Mr Obama seeks to minimise his exposure to Washington and emphasise his communitarian works in a former life.
Will we see experience emphasised or challenged at this New Zealand general election? It must be tempting for Labour to attack Mr Key's short tenure. To prepare a television advertisement along the lines of Mrs Clinton's one portraying a telephone ringing at 3am in the White House after a terror attack, with the voiceover question of "Who would you want to answer that call?" To play on Helen Clark's half a lifetime as an MP and nine years as Prime Minister in a way that undermines Mr Key's leadership appeal.
But it is unlikely to be a major strategy. It runs the risk of reminding voters just how long the one face, the one character has dominated our politics. If even subliminally, it creates a contrast between a life in publicly funded jobs versus Mr Key's mix of private sector, foreign and New Zealand work before entering the public sphere. And there is a risk of painting Helen Clark and others in government as being at the end of an illustrious era of service rather than at the beginning.
The Prime Minister is shrewd enough to know that Labour will already have been judged, without charity, on its first nine years. So she is already talking about Labour's plan for the future, almost exclusively. Mr Key has that option, plus an opportunity to parlay change and hope in the spirit of Obama. Expect to hear much from both sides in the next eight months on new thinking and promise; rather less on that dubious commodity, experience.
