John Armstrong: Week of woe lesson in control for Key

After a week of political horrors, here's something even more frightening for National to contemplate.

With Melissa Lee's campaign in the Mt Albert byelection having imploded, National supporters desert her in droves and instead vote tactically for the Greens' candidate Russel Norman to try to stop Labour romping home.

Too far-fetched? Strange things happen in byelections. With nothing riding on this one apart from the respective parties' dignity and self-esteem, voters can do as they like.

With four weeks left until polling day, there is still time for Lee to pull off some kind of Lazarus act which sees her and National avoid the ignominy of running a poor third.

For now, Lee is in the dog-box for not heeding advice. However, she should not shoulder sole responsibility for the Government's ghastly week. John Key's minority Government has been an accident waiting to happen.

National has enjoyed a dream run which has disguised some pretty sloppy day-to-day political management and damage control and, at times, a complete lack of either.

National is still coming to terms with the need for governments to ensure they exercise total control over the things they can control - like a byelection candidate - in the knowledge there are going to be things that they cannot control which are going to cause trouble.

Helen Clark put a premium on doing this. She made political management look much easier than it is. Despite her control-freak mentality, Labour still stumbled many times over mistakes of its own making.

The litany of self-inflicted woes of the past week suggests National will stumble even more. Holding it all together requires that whatever political management and communications strategy is operating in the Beehive be accordingly beefed-up.

There were warning signs back in January when Labour was allowed to run amok, accusing National of going to sleep over the summer and failing to come up with an adequate response to the deepening international economic downturn in terms of saving domestic jobs and livelihoods.

That mattered little then. The country was on holiday; the financial crisis had yet to make its impact felt.

Since then, the Prime Minister's sharp political antennae and political nous have coped capably with most problems that have arisen. But he is still learning on the job. He cannot do everything. Moreover, politics is an unpredictable business. Who would have counted on the party's byelection candidate spinning out?

National had only a slim chance of parading Phil Goff's head on a stick by securing an unlikely victory in Mt Albert. That was contingent on nothing going wrong with National's campaign and little going right with Labour's.

Lee's hapless campaign has seen to that. But her errors should not be allowed to overshadow what on a national level is the potentially more damaging appointment of Christine Rankin to the Families Commission.

This will have left middle-ground voters who Key wooed so assiduously while in Opposition asking themselves that if National could install such a tactless, divisive figure from the conservative right in such a job, then what else is his Government capable of doing?

Key had gone a long way towards removing National's flinty image. But this week it was back and lit large in neon, first with the Rankin appointment and then Lee's stereotyping of South Aucklanders as criminals.

The Government utterly misjudged the impact of bringing Rankin on to the commission's board - and it knows it. There was no attempt to come up with a sound rationale for the appointment. Instead, National Party ministers were trampling over one another to distance themselves from Social Development Minister Paula Bennett, who is being blamed for the blunder.

She had to apologise for failing to properly consult National' s support partner, United Future's Peter Dunne - another sign all is not well with the Government's political management.

Lee, meanwhile, was apologising for her crass remark. Her faux pas was the slip of a candidate under massive pressure, having been kneecapped by her own party on the critical issue of the byelection, the Waterview Connection. On top of that, she struggled to bat away allegations that public money had been used by her television production company to make a National Party commercial in the last election campaign.

The triple whammy has dramatically changed the dynamics of the byelection because Lee is now seen as having zero chance of winning.

Labour, too, will be horrified by the prospect of the byelection becoming a two-horse race between Norman and its candidate, David Shearer. (Tactical voters are less likely to back Act's John Boscawen because he will not attract support from those alienated from Labour. Norman will.)

For now, though, Labour is in the box seat. Byelections are all about not making mistakes. Shearer may not be setting the world on fire, but he has stayed out of trouble.

Crucially, he is on the correct side of the argument in political terms on Waterview in arguing the link road go completely underground. It is a credible position because Labour has pushed for a tunnel for the past 18 months.

In contrast, Transport Minister Steven Joyce - probably inadvertently - reduced National's flexibility by scrapping Labour's plan for a tunnel well before the byelection. Resurrecting it during the byelection would have looked like Government pork-barrelling at its worst.

Joyce has done his level best to find an affordable compromise. Astonishingly, though, no one bothered to tell Lee prior to her squaring-off with Shearer on TVNZ's Q+A last Sunday that the New Zealand Transport Agency was about to unveil such a compromise which would see large sections of the road constructed below ground-level.

As one Labour insider wryly put it, Lee was left flapping like a flounder washed up on the beach as she tried to defend a standard motorway cutting through the heart of the electorate.

Wednesday's announcement of the actual route was less about the byelection, however, and more about National reassuring the rest of Auckland that it is serious about building new roads to ease traffic congestion. That is one reason why Key has never hyped National's chances of winning Mt Albert. National is finding - just as Labour did in losing the Timaru byelection early in its 1984-87 term in office - that new governments are handicapped in fighting byelections. They are hell-bent on pushing through reform agendas at a national level and are not in the mood to jeopardise those agendas simply to scratch some local political itch.

The same factor is evident in this Government's handling of the overhaul of Auckland's ramshackle local government structure. It is coming in for criticism not so much for the Super City concept as the haste with which it is implementing the plan.

It is another major irritant for National in the byelection. But the Government is more exercised with getting the city's new structure of local government in place. At the end of the day, this is a byelection National does not need to win. It has to govern in the interim. But neither does it want to lose badly. For all Lee's lapses, National's hierarchy cannot afford to wipe its hands of her and leave her to struggle on alone.