John Armstrong: Voters deserting rightist dynamo

As far as personal torment goes, Rodney Hide at times cuts a tragic figure of almost Shakespearian proportions.

Never more so than last year when Act's leader was forced to make an abject public apology for being less than frugal with taxpayers' money.

Whether or not the public bought the sincerity of that apology, there is little question that Hide's spectacular fall from grace has made it a lot more difficult, if not impossible for him to resuscitate Act's flagging support in the polls.

Backing for Act is now flat-lining at around 2 per cent. The phone is well and truly off the hook as far as voters are concerned.

Whether Hide can re-establish the connection - even whether he is still the right person to be trying to do so - will be weighing heavily on delegates' minds during Act's annual conference in Wellington this weekend.

No one will be injudicious enough to mention last November's failed leadership coup against Hide mounted by his deputy, Heather Roy, and the party's ideological guru, Sir Roger Douglas.

Even the slightest reference to that fiasco will create the kind of headlines which will turn the conference into a public relations disaster.

Officially, there was no coup. Full stop. All that Hide will concede is that there was a caucus discussion about his performance as leader. Nothing more than that.

Party insiders, however, describe the "discussion" as more like an evisceration, with Roy and Sir Roger tearing strips off their leader.

Those denying hand on heart that there was no move against Hide justify that stance on the basis it never came to a vote. But that was because the putsch was stopped dead in its tracks once National got wind of it. While stressing he had no control over who Act chose to be its leader, the Prime Minister made it clear he would have no truck with Sir Roger and his hard-right policy agenda.

How much fence-mending has been done within the five-MP caucus in the three months since the ructions may become clearer at the conference.

It is intriguing to see that today's deputy leader's address has been scheduled immediately before Hide's keynote speech.

Those of a Machiavellian bent might see the timing as a deliberate move on Hide's part to show exactly who is boss.

If so, it is high-risk stuff on his part. Delegates will inevitably take measure of who comes across the best in terms of style and substance. That will still be the case if the speeches have been scheduled to coincide to enable Hide and Roy to indulge in a much-needed display of unity.

Things could go horribly wrong for Hide, however. He is the one under pressure to perform - not his feisty, tough-minded deputy.

She is capable of producing a speech which could eclipse Hide's. She delivered a cracker at Act's post-election conference last year, warning of the difficulties of being a support partner of the new National minority Government.

She argued that Act needed to re-establish its relevance to ordinary people's lives every single day if it was not to go the way of other small parties which have propped up major parties in Government only to end up in oblivion.

That meant individual MPs or the caucus as a whole consistently achieving "personal bests" in whatever they were doing.

Roy's speech set the bar for Act's performance - and was blithely ignored by Hide going on expensive jaunts to London and Hawaii courtesy of the taxpayer.

In a flash, he went from hero to zero. His behaviour made a complete nonsense of those parts of Act's 20-point "action plan" which fulminate against Government waste and the baubles of power.

Hide repented. But his apology failed to satisfy Roy and Sir Roger. News of their abortive coup did not surface until just before Christmas, by which time MPs had decamped from Parliament and the political year was as good as over.

Act should be grateful for small mercies. There has been scant media coverage since - and much of that has largely consisted of blanket denials by the protagonists of what was going on.

Quite how Roy and Douglas thought a leadership change would help Act when the party's survival as a parliamentary force currently depends on Hide holding on to his electorate seat of Epsom might seem a puzzle.

But it is less of a mystery when splits in the wider party are taken into account. Act is a party of idealists. That is its abiding strength. But there are two camps: the pragmatic idealists represented by Hide and the purist idealists for whom Sir Roger holds the status of near prophet.

The latter camp complain that as Act has got ever closer to power, the wider party organisation has become weaker. Worse, it has become increasingly unclear what the party actually stands for.

There are gripes that the party's board of directors bows too much to the demands of the leader; that Act lacks a clear vision of where it is going which makes it difficult to recruit and retain members; that while Act has good policies, these are poorly communicated.

Worryingly for Hide, many of these concerns are also shared by the pragmatists.

Where the two camps differ markedly is that the purists want to see the party promoting policies which reflect the vision long espoused by Sir Roger. They believe by doing so Act can can carve out a big niche of support above the 5 per cent required to meet the threshold for getting MPs into Parliament. That would make Act no longer reliant on winning Epsom, which, given the likelihood of alterations to the MMP electoral system, is not going to be a crutch Act will be able to rely on for much longer to get back into Parliament. Ipso facto, the party would no longer be reliant on Hide.

The purists, however, are in the minority. Paradoxically, the failed coup may have strengthened Hide's grasp on the leadership.

His one concession to his critics is acceptance that he needs to spend less time wearing his ministerial hat in Wellington and more time going around the country flying the flag for Act.

Hide argues that it was necessary for him to devote time and energy last year at the coal-face of Government policy formation to ensure Act secured gains from National, such as the three-strikes-and-your-out measure. Otherwise, Act would have little concrete by way of achievements to shout about at the next election.

He also believes Key's centrist inclinations and unwillingness to force the pace of economic reform are frustrating many National supporters and opening up the possibility for Act to pick up support on National's right flank.

Maybe. But the thing the Act faithful want to see first is the resurrection of the Rodney Hide of old - the passionate, energised and tireless advocate of Act principles. On that score, Hide cannot afford to disappoint when he takes centre-stage later this afternoon.