KEY POINTS:
Dear Mr. Key,
When are you and your team going to get your act together?
You have been given the chance, for the first time since the pernicious MMP electoral system arrived, to win sufficient seats and party votes for National to govern alone.
But if your stumblebum colleagues continue to put their feet in it just about every time they open their mouths, then you're not just losing the golden opportunity to govern alone, you risk blowing your chances altogether.
And that would be a tragedy, for a huge majority of the electorate has had an absolute gutsful of Helen Clark and her crowd of nanny state meddlers and are looking for a change.
We are not, however, prepared to hand over the levers of power to just anyone. We have to be persuaded that those for whom we vote will have the ability and the political courage to do what has to be done to right a ship of state that has drifted further and further off course.
Now I don't criticise you for a moment for withholding major policy planks, any more than I blame the Prime Minister for withholding the election date, which she probably decided on weeks ago, until it suits her.
But please, John, when you do let go of some policy would you make certain from now on that it is done properly and in detail and not in such a way as to do the party more harm than good.
We know that politicians are in the habit of running off at the mouth, but we expect them to engage their brains before they put their tongues in gear. And heaven knows Maurice Williamson has been round long enough to have learned that.
Yet that, in itself, is a handicap. You have to remember that while you yourself are fresh and new and so far unsullied by the poisonous atmosphere of Parliament and politics in general, you have around you senior members of your team who've been around since the year dot.
And most of them, you must understand, are irretrievably sullied by their association with the dreadful era of Ruth Richardson and Jenny Shipley, a period which, although it is many years past, is still firmly in the memory of the politically aware, and remains the most shameful blot on the escutcheon of the National Party's proud history.
There are, of course, similar politicians in Labour's ranks - those who were associated with the likes of Douglas, Prebble, Caygill and co. But those veterans have had time to show, in Government, that they have changed their ways.
Sure, we know that in most cases the change is only skin deep and that they would quickly revert to their former ways if they thought they could get away with it, but the public in general isn't nearly wide awake enough, or interested enough, to have figured that out. You and your colleagues have not had the chance to show that the policies of the 1980s and 90s are, indeed, a thing of the past.
Yet this is what you must do if you are to succeed in capturing the Treasury benches.
It certainly doesn't help when you have your deputy, Bill English, talking about selling off Kiwibank, or Mr Williamson talking about it costing workers $50 a week to use toll roads.
Those things are redolent of the Richardson years, and give the willies to those of us who remember the brutal depredations of those times.
As for Kiwibank, I have just this week invested with that institution half of the paltry sum of my worldly wealth, and I did so because it is New Zealand-owned and its reasonable profits do not fill the pockets of overseas shareholders.
I, and scores of thousands of other New Zealanders, would hate to see it go the way of the BNZ and fall into the hands of foreigners.
On the other hand I have no argument with the principle of public-private partnerships, be they to build roads, own schools or even build hospitals.
I know that, after the drubbings National took in 1999 and 2002, you really need the political experience of the senior men and women in your team.
In fact, they are for the time being indispensable.
But they need to be kept under a tight rein, particularly those whose laissez faire, right-wing ideology seems to have remained relatively undimmed.
Most of us don't want any longer to have the Greens telling us how we should live, right down to the light bulbs we must use; we don't want any more of the shenanigans of Winston Peters, or of the fence-sitting of Peter Dunne.
We want enlightened, competent, decisive government that recognises, and enhances, the rights and freedoms of the individual in a democracy.
So please, John, no more stuff-ups.
Blessings,
Garth George.
