KEY POINTS:
That John Key's leadership has lost momentum has been obvious for some time. It hardly amounts to a crisis. It was always going to happen anyway. But the time has come to do something about it.
With Parliament in recess next week, Key will use Tuesday's anniversary of
his becoming National's leader as a platform to begin restoring his flagging public profile.
While a tight lid is being kept on Key's plans, one initiative will see him whistle-stop through something like 28 towns in 12 days in a pre-Christmas tour of the provinces.
That will not necessarily put him back in the spotlight. The tour is designed more with the purpose of showing Key is in touch with "heartland"' New Zealand. It is about scotching any notion National is coasting and taking next year's election for granted.
It also looks very much like a dry run to alert Key to the wearying nature of a four-week election campaign.
A tired leader is a mistake-prone leader. Helen Clark has already indicated she intends placing "leadership" at the heart of Labour's campaign by forcing voters to compare which of the two is the most credible and the most capable.
This will be her fifth campaign as Labour's leader. It will be Key's first as National's. She is unlikely to make mistakes on the stump. She will be relying on Key's relative inexperience catching him out in some way his advisers could not have foreseen.
Key is well aware of that pressure. He is relentlessly self-critical in analysing his own performance.
While she may have the authority of experience, he has a natural warmth and charm to get straight through to middle New Zealand.
Labour will try and counter by portraying Key as a cardboard cut-out. "All front and no body," declared Pete Hodgson, spearheading Labour's three-pronged ministerial attack on Key during Wednesday's general debate in Parliament.
Out came the standard lines. Key lacks substance. Key cannot be held to any position. Key does not really believe in anything. Key cannot be trusted. Key cannot take the pressure. Key lacks gravitas.
National might argue these assertions do not stack up. But many voters feel they still don't know Key or what makes him tick. Labour is happy to fill in the gaps for them.
There is some irony in the fact that a leader more representative of traditional National Party moderation and pragmatism is being made to look vulnerable through an apparent absence of ideology.
But Key needs to explain the "why" of his wanting to become Prime Minister. His first 12 months as leader have concentrated on the "how" of becoming Prime Minister. He has restored the political component to the leadership absent during Don Brash's tenure. He has cleanly and decisively shifted National to the vote-rich centre ground and neutralised issues where National is in a no-win position. He has injected discipline and unity into National's caucus. He has fearlessly taken the fight to Clark in Parliament.
Yet, in retrospect, much of this work has merely elevated National to where it should have been already but for Brash's idiosyncratic leadership.
Key has not come through unscathed. He rattled Labour's complacency early on by embarrassing its social conscience with his depiction of an "underclass". He surged up the preferred Prime Minister ratings. Labour tried ignoring him. When that did not work, Labour attacked him. Labour's constant chipping started to slow Key's bandwagon. The balance tilted further following the series of gaffes by Key and colleagues over Iraq, doctor's fees and the partial sale of state-owned corporations.
National lost traction. It has now regained it thanks to Labour's woeful handling of the vexatious Electoral Finance Bill and its capitulation to the necessity of tax cuts.
Key is having more difficulty regaining momentum. No longer automatically the centre of attention, Key is discovering the vicissitudes of being Leader of the Opposition.
Essentially you have two choices: try and keep above the transitory and petty political battles and try to set your own agenda, or, grab whatever is going for the sake of publicity.
The first option can see a leader get desperate and resort to stunts. The latter can see a leader look small-minded and lacking the big picture. Even worse is to fall somewhere in between and disappear altogether.
As a case in point, Clark in Opposition would have been all over something like the Electoral Finance Bill. Key has largely left it to Bill English. That has been deliberate so that Key is not contaminated by being part of an argument from which no one is likely to emerge in positive light.
Key has also kept out of the limelight in the past couple of months because, having talked himself into trouble too often, he has had to become more self-disciplined about what he says.
His good fortune is that he will not have to endure this purgatory for much longer.
The political year is nearly over. From late January next year, the Leader of the Opposition's job will get considerably easier as the election rollercoaster starts to pick up speed. There are speeches to make on National's overall direction. There is policy to release. There is no longer pressure to make something out of nothing to make an impact. Key can start talking in direct terms about exactly how and what National would do differently.
Following the "me too-ism" of the past year, this increasing differentiation from Labour through policy messages aligned more closely to National's core principles will paint Key in sharper relief and make clearer exactly what he stands for.
He will reinforce this differentiation by developing a narrative of how he intends taking New Zealand forward - that National will undertake real economic transformation whereas Labour just talks about it.
The politics of aspiration are more difficult to sell when the economy still seems to be barrelling along nicely. But Key is conscious National needs to start cutting into Labour's core vote, which remains resilient to erosion.
The reason it is strong is because Labour has delivered on policies that help families. It is not sufficient for National to simply mouth reassurances that it will not strip away entitlements. Its policies need to be more family-conscious in a meaningful way.
All fine in theory. Boiling all this down into digestible sound-bites will not be easy, even for a skilled communicator like Key. But that is the task in front of him as his leadership enters a new and more challenging phase.
