Leadership ambitions put down with poetry

With the Australian leadership coup by carrot-coloured Julia Gillard so fresh, National could not resist teasing New Zealand Labour about potential parallels here in the free-for-all known as the general debate.

With taxpayer-funded porn movies having somewhat dampened the leadership ambitions of Shane Jones, others have been targeted for the tease.

Simon Power kicked off with a word of warning for Labour's Grant Robertson, a first term MP who has already been tipped as a future leader.

Power, who has also carried that burden himself, on and off, warned him it would do his prospects no good.

It didn't wipe the embarrassed grin off Robertson's face, nor that of Labour's "ginga and proud" Darren Hughes, who wanted to be an MP and possibly Prime Minister since he was a boy.

Power's last word of warning was for Phil Goff: "Keep your eye on the redheads," he said.

Maurice Williamson gave Labour's finance spokesman David Cunliffe's leadership ambitions a workout.

Unfortunately for Cunliffe, his successful ambitions many years ago to publish poetry while on a Fulbright Fellowship to Harvard University have been used to bite him again and again.

Yesterday's tease took a different turn, however. The poem I am Harvard was not the target.

It was a poem called Seasons and Williamson reckoned it was full of secret references to a leadership challenge.

Williamson began reading it:

Spring comes suddenly in New England. Almost without warning branches that just a few weeks before were dead, dry twigs...

"I think he is talking about some of his colleagues."

...are crowned with the lushest dry foliage.

"I think there is a clue there: it is to do with the Greens coalition he is looking to get together."

But spring is brief, as a delicate balance between irresistible forces wresting for control, it gives way, explosively, to summer...

Each summer changes history.

Williamson concludes that Cunliffe's plan for the leadership bid is exposed.

"We are in winter, we have only got spring to go then spring gets rid of the dead twigs, the dead branches and it's all on."

Cunliffe was absent from the chamber and was spared the embarrassment.