John Armstrong: Goff leaps out of his comfort zone

Phil Goff insists he is not playing the race card. And, on the face of it, he would seem justified in saying that.

You would be hard-pressed to find any statement in the speech delivered on Thursday by the Labour leader which taken alone is so blatant it warrants the race-card accusation.

The key words are "taken alone". Put all the statements together and it is patently clear that Goff, at the very least, has grasped the race card and is flashing it, if not playing it for all he is worth.

He is not as yet strip-mining this potentially vote-rich conservative terrain to the same extent Winston Peters and Don Brash did. But it is only a matter of degree.

By Labour standards, the tone and language of Goff's carefully crafted address signify a dramatic lurch in the direction of the stance on race taken by those other two political luminaries.

It is impossible to conceive Helen Clark delivering such a speech. Or David Lange. Or Sir Geoffrey Palmer.

Mike Moore, the last Labour leader to pitch so overtly to Labour's evaporating conservative male support, had a strong antipathy to those exploiting divisions over race. He also knew that being tribal Labour meant he could not do it.

Goff's sudden repositioning of himself to the right on race matters runs counter to that tradition.

But it may be only a temporary manifestation. Like his repositioning of Labour on other matters such as monetary policy, it has one simple objective - lifting Labour's and his own parlous ratings in pending pre-Christmas opinion polls.

National's befriending of the Maori Party has left a vacuum on the centre-right which Goff is trying to fill. Normally, however, such a gap would be filled by a party on National's right rather than its left.

That is an important distinction. This is a huge gamble by Goff. If the strategy fails to deliver, he will be subject to widespread scorn and derision. His leadership may be well and truly crippled.

But such a positioning grates against everything people think Labour stands for. For it to work, people have to believe that Goff believes what he is saying. Yet, in his 25 years in Parliament, Goff has never traversed this territory. In fact, quite the contrary.

Unable to shrug off his own and his party's value system, Goff is having to work within far tighter limits than Brash did. Thursday's speech was consequently not on a par with the former National leader's infamous Orewa delivery.

Goff instead relied on Peters' technique of leaving his listeners to make the leap to the conclusion he wanted them to reach, while ensuring he retained the crucial commodity of deniability when the accusations of race-based politicking started flying.

Perhaps the most telling phraseology was Goff's repeating of Shane Jones' castigation of the Maori Party's agreement on legislation setting up a new emissions trading scheme (or ETS for short) as not so much being pork-barrel politics as "pork bone politics".

In the next sentence, Goff referred to unspecified "corporates" as having seen the chance for a handout "and naturally they have taken it". Goff did not say "Maori" corporates. But they are clearly the ones to which he was referring.

Goff said he was not blaming them for doing what any other business would do. He then declared suggestions he was playing the race card to be a red herring, saying and it was the paying of subsidies to big corporations under National's ETS that he was talking about, "and I am not going to shy away from saying so".

But the denials are the giveaway. He would not be issuing them if he were not indulging in such obvious "dog-whistle politics", where the message is delivered silently but picked up by the audience with the right ears to hear it.

The other giveaway is that it can hardly be coincidence that his speech followed his sparring with Hone Harawira.

After months in the shadows, Goff suddenly found himself in the spotlight. The Maori Party's deal with National on its ETS enabled him to stay in the spotlight.

Goff is dangerously vulnerable to opportunism in order to remain in the media focus. But unlike the Richard Worth affair, this time opportunism is being diluted by a strong dose of caution.

Thursday's speech was run past several MPs in Goff's caucus, including senior Maori members Jones and Parekura Horomia.

Goff's office made a point of issuing copies of the Hansard transcription of Jones' rich oratory in Parliament the day before during the lengthy and prolonged debate on the ETS legislation.The intention was to show Goff was saying much the same things as one of Labour's Maori MPs and therefore could not be accused of playing the race card.

The difference was that Jones' target was the Maori Party, while Goff's was National. Their dual attack was an attempt to drive a wedge between the governing party and its support partner.

But National is not going to make Harawira's mistake of giving Goff the attention he craves by accusing him of being a racist. John Key instead portrayed Goff's speech as the work of a struggling politician desperately in search of a headline.

By not engaging with him, National is seeking to deprive Goff of oxygen, thereby forcing him to take even more extreme positions.

National does not believe Goff can sustain such a heavily conservative line of attack for very long without Labour's MPs, party members and activists, and its liberal-minded supporters, especially the female component, becoming very uncomfortable.

Notably, two left-leaning political blogs, No Right Turn and The Standard, have panned Goff's speech, the latter saying it was "stupid and wrong" on many levels.

"We deserve better than this," declared the anonymous contributor.

The feeling within National is Goff has clambered aboard a runaway train which he will find very difficult to get off. If he does get off it, everyone will ask what the point of the exercise was.

The longer he stays on it, the more he risks wrecking Labour's efforts to win back Maori.

It is trying to do so by persuading Maori voters that the Maori Party is simply not delivering the goods.

This week Labour seemed hell-bent on destroying the Maori Party. Again, this is high risk. If the Maori Party survives as a parliamentary force after the next election, Labour may well need need its backing to be able to govern. Goff's tactics are instead driving the Maori Party even closer to National.

Goff's sudden opposition to the repeal of Labour's foreshore and seabed law will only strengthen that bond. Again, the logic of that move is questionable.

The priority for Goff, however, is to get traction in the polls. An upwards spike in Labour's support would make all the difference to Labour's state of mind when it kicks off the new year.

The status quo is not an option. Goff has to take risks. If the strategy works, John Key will have much to think about.

If it doesn't, the Labour caucus will have to do likewise.