Editorial: Douglas' rogue act of desperation

Hilary Calvert and Rodney Hide. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Act Party leader Rodney Hide put on his brave face on Friday, hoping to sweep the recent troubles of his accident-prone caucus off the political stage as he introduced his new MP, Dunedin lawyer Hilary Calvert, to the media and the country.

It's become a familiar face of late, even if its component parts - a fixed smile and slightly manic gaze - have a tinge of more desperation than bravado about them.

Yet even as Hide seeks to settle things down after the six-week circus in which the party came close to self-immolation, the picture remains of a deeply dysfunctional organisation.

Sir Roger Douglas' attempt to divert attention from Act's woes by issuing a flyer attacking the Prime Minister's "head-in-the-sand" attitude to catching up with Australia was not just laughably clumsy. It was also rather disturbing.

After being in the headlines for all the wrong reasons - a deputy leader ousted amid claims her boss was a menacing bully; the Garrett revelations and Hide's woolly attempts to dissociate himself from them - this is a time for Act to keep off the front pages and out of the limelight.

Sir Roger was doubtless seeking to wrest the party's public-image initiative back by the flyer campaign, but he looked like a man who had just taken over the primary responsibility for pursuing the party's death wish.

Extraordinarily, he told Radio New Zealand that he had not even discussed with his leader ("Rodney's busy," he explained) his proposal to launch an attack on the leader of his coalition.

When a member of a five-person caucus in a junior coalition partner teetering on the edge of political oblivion is behaving like an Opposition MP and firing at will at the Prime Minister, something is seriously wrong.

It has to be said that John Key's "Anyone except Douglas" pronouncement, which ruled out working with Sir Roger as Act leader but left the door open to anyone else, was unduly dogmatic.

Act got five seats with the deliberate connivance of National and has influence out of proportion to its share of the vote, but it is up to the electorate - specifically the voters of Epsom - to decide whether that mandate will continue. Coalition politics requires compromise, not confrontation.

But those Epsom voters will need to have very short memories indeed if they are to support Hide in next year's poll. A party that has displayed such shiftiness and hypocrisy deserves to disappear from the political landscape.