KEY POINTS:
With only a week and a bit to go, the election campaign shows no sign of becoming more interesting, let alone even mildly exciting. In fact, it's as boring a campaign as I can remember.
There are a number of reasons for this, the first of which is that both the main parties are trying to capture that amorphous and anonymous mass of the electorate known as "the centre".
Labour is terrified of being seen as too far to the left and National is similarly determined not to be seen as being too far to the right.
Consequently the two principal parties jostle one another in the restricted arena of "the centre" and neither is able to score a king hit on the other because to do so would demand either a rightward or a leftward shift.
Which explains why John Key and National have had to swallow so many of Labour's dead rats; and why Helen Clark and Labour decline to announce any plans to deal with the international economic mayhem until after the election.
It also explains why Maurice Williamson and Lockwood Smith, rightish survivors of the most recent and never-lamented National Administration, get smacked on the hand for making perfectly reasonable remarks.
Tut, tut, chaps, we mustn't offend "the centre".
The two parties' efforts to capture the centre mean their policies cannot be too far apart, so there are too few real policy differences to give us any good reason to choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
So far, the biggest difference seems to be that John Key has accepted a suggestion made in this column last year that titles be restored to our most honoured citizens, which has drawn derision from his opposite number. And that says more about her than about him.
"The use of aristocratic titles is out[side] of the Kiwi value system," she said (which is rubbish). "The titles never sat comfortably with me ... "
Well, who cares? They sat comfortably with everyone else except a handful of republicans. As a constitutional monarchy, we have every right to ask the Queen to confer knighthoods on the recommendation of our Government, safe in the knowledge that the choices are made locally.
The second reason for boredom is that the election campaign is firmly focused on just two people - John Key and Helen Clark - which deprives us to a large extent of the immense human interest contained in the lives of 120-odd other candidates.
Granted, this newspaper and others provide us from time to time with in-depth looks at various candidates - where they're coming from, where they are and where they'd like to go - and those interviews, by John Roughan, Yvonne Tahana and others, are so far the most interesting reads of the entire campaign.
There was a time when elections were invariably fought on local issues and candidates slugged it out in their local newspapers so that by the time polling day came there was usually a standout, even though editors in those days ran a ruler over every political story to ensure that each main candidate got the same coverage.
These days, apart from the ubiquitous billboards that deface the landscape (and, yes, I have at last seen one for New Zealand First), you would hardly be aware there was an election campaign on.
I presume the local candidates are beavering away holding meetings and knocking on doors, but it is only when one of the main party leaders rides into town that any great media interest arises.
Helen Clark has been in Rotorua more than once throwing money around and John Key several times talking up tourism. That's not surprising since it's such a marginal seat.
But the concentration on a pair of presidential-type personalities and on national issues takes any human or local interest out of the campaign.
But I suppose it makes sense since governing New Zealand is about the equivalent of governing a small city in most other places in the world.
The third, and undeniably the most important, reason for the boredom of this election campaign is that none of the participants have shown any real vision.
Vision is defined in the journalists' bible, the Concise Oxford Dictionary, as "the ability to think about or plan the future with imagination or wisdom". Neither Helen Clark nor John Key seems to have that ability.
Sure, they talk about "vision", but their visions seem always to be material and thus oh so mundane. They are certainly not the sort that enthuse the electorate by giving people genuine hope for the future, or entrance us with an idea of how things could be and how to make them so.
And, as the timeless wisdom of the Book of Proverbs observes: "Where there is no vision, the people perish".
