KEY POINTS:
The National Party's weekend conference wasn't a conference. It was a marketing exercise.
The 700 or so delegates at the annual gathering were essentially surplus to requirements, their role reduced largely to that of a clapping machine as the party's senior MPs engaged in relentless promotion of the party's emerging policies and its leader from the stage of the Wellington Town Hall. The real audience for this carefully choreographed, but rather passionless affair was the one outside the hall - the voter.
Those inside had one supreme objective: to project National as a capable and competent Government-in-waiting rather than a party complacently awaiting its turn to govern as of some perceived right.
But there is always someone who forgets to stick to the script. Bob Clarkson's mention of the "B word" drew a collective gasp from delegates. Then they realised the retirement-bound Tauranga MP's reference to 150 members of the Exclusive Brethren helping him in his electorate was another of Clarkson's little jokes. At least, they hoped so. His impromptu contribution simply highlighted the degree to which the conference was stage-managed. But it was focused - as the above-stage slogan stressed, "Focused on What Matters".
That was an oblique way of saying Labour isn't. It was also a way of saying Labour does not have fresh ideas, but National does.
To prove it, National has broken its policy drought. It had to. It could not have got through the conference with everyone from the leader downwards spouting nothing but bland filler. National was going to have to say how it would do things differently and come up with something of substance. It was going to have to flesh out its intentions for tax cuts. It could not afford to leave a media vacuum.
So there were major announcements on tax and infrastructure spending. Their brevity left many gaps - such as exactly how National can afford bigger tax cuts without borrowing and what will happen to KiwiSaver. But at last voters are getting a steer on what a John Key-led National government might be like.
It will be conventionally centre-right on law and order, education and tax policy. Where it would be more revolutionary is in getting the private sector to run state-provided services under contract - such as managing prisons, using private hospitals to cut waiting times for operations, providing choice in accident compensation insurance and setting up public-private partnerships to fund the building of major capital projects, such as roads and hospitals.
There have already been isolated examples of this under Labour, but Key is flagging that there would be a lot more of it under National.
National is also gearing up for a severe pruning of various quangos, appendages and functions inside and outside government departments which it deems serve no useful purpose. "We will do what works," Key told the conference, summing up his modus operandi should he become Prime Minister.
He sold himself as a self-proclaimed pragmatist not blinded by ideology. The party puts him on a higher pedestal, with party president Judy Kirk painting his as a figure of hope and confidence in uncertain times.
Whether or not he is a Man for All Seasons, what matters for National is that he is a break from the past, whereas Helen Clark is not.
Of her, though, there was barely a mention. That was deliberate. If the conference was focusing on what matters, what really mattered was that National come out of hibernation and start talking about what it would do right rather than what others have done wrong.
