KEY POINTS:
It is to the credit of the leaders of both main political parties that they have opened the election year with substantial speeches about substantial matters.
There have been unseemly outbreaks of dirty political tactics practised by both National and Labour in the past two years and it would be good to think that the 2008 election campaign will be a contest in which substance is valued over style.
As to the substance, National leader John Key has certainly had the better of the early exchange of blows. He needed to. Since assuming the party leadership he has struggled to shake the image of being something of a policy lightweight, a financial-market whizz-kid who, for all his protestations about being poor-born, is out of touch with the real world. His speech in Ellerslie on Tuesday was short on anything resembling oratorical flourish - a demagogue this man is not - but it revealed a leader keen to grapple with the issues close to voters' hearts.
Indeed, Tuesday's issue was probably more hot-button than Key himself could have hoped. Helen Clark's sideswipe comment that the speech had "focused on what you might call 'deficit"' rather failed to take account of the fact that there has been quite a lot of deficit to focus on since the start of the year. In a month which has earned the unfortunate soubriquet "mad January", murder and mayhem, most of it involving young people, have become daily fixtures in the news columns.
There is room for disagreement as to the cause of the dysfunction, although simple answers (it's because of the full moon or the abolition of capital punishment) are most usefully disregarded. But the unease it has generated was fertile ground for Key.
The fact that his suggestion of a boot-camp-style "Fresh Start" for young offenders has been well-received by both sides of the law-and-order debate - the hardline Sensible Sentencing Trust and the liberal Prison Fellowship - is an indication of how deep and widespread anxiety is. In the working-class neighbourhoods where Labour has always been able to count on electoral support; in the blue-ribbon National strongholds; and in the liberal centre ground, people are ready for leadership in this matter.
If Key's speech struck a public nerve, Clark's by contrast seemed bloodless. The idea of requiring students to be in recognised education or training until the age of 18 is simply a raising of the school-leaving age by another name. There is undoubted merit in developing the proposed youth apprenticeship options for students who lack academic inclinations, but in trying to characterise these two moves as a development of the knowledge economy for the 21st century, Labour risks looking foolish. The youngsters concerned are those who, until now, left school at 16. On the whole - and there are impressive, even legendary exceptions - these are not our best and brightest. Little wonder that educationists are so wary at the prospect of having to implement the proposal without extra and specialised resources.
It was telling that the two leaders' speeches came in the same week that veteran South Auckland school principal Shirley Maihi said young boys needed more male role models. (Her remarks echoed those of Celia Lashlie who lost her job in 2000 for talking about the plight of fatherless and unmentored young men.)
Labour's youth apprenticeship proposal resurrects a fine idea from the distant past. South Auckland teachers who remember the incentive payments once provided for country service may wonder why no one suggests turning to that model to ease the male crisis in primary teaching. Tell a male teacher trainee that, if he works, say, two years in South Auckland, he'll have his tertiary fees reimbursed. After five years, he could get a $10,000 bonus. If such tinkering is dismissed as interfering with market forces, we may all be beyond help.
