Prebble swoops home and away

By Eugene Bingham

Sitting on dirt-stained, roughened hands as if to hide them, Dean Richardson keeps a keen eye on the man he holds responsible for his redundancy.

Act leader Richard Prebble is in Timaru on one of his lightning sorties into the rural heartland the party covets.

"I used to work at the Post Office until we got shut down," says Mr Richardson, whose hands are now scarred by hard work in the fruit and vegetable markets.

"And who made me redundant?" He answers his own question by pointing across the room where Mr Prebble is chatting to several men in suits.

He holds no bitterness. In fact, Mr Richardson's forgiveness runs so deep that he has become one of Mr Prebble's most enthusiastic supporters. This year he is the Act candidate in the seat of Aoraki.

Mr Richardson says the Act message is exactly what needs to be heard in the backblocks and provincial centres.

His conversion illustrates how Mr Prebble and Act have captured people by raising issues that niggle them. It also shows how the range of party supporters is as much a box of contradictions as Mr Prebble himself.

The man who once sat in a Labour cabinet and is now the sworn enemy of the centre-left; the butt of jokes who thrives on making cheap jokes at others' expense; the man with the "mad-dog" reputation who occasionally wilts and reveals an insecure side.

In some ways, his whole campaign has required him to have a split personality. He is, after all, fighting two battles.

As leader, he is at the forefront of Act's push for the party vote, while on the home front, he is in a ding-dong battle for the crucial seat of Wellington Central.

Though the electorate has 13 candidates, the absence of National and the Alliance means the race is between Mr Prebble and Labour's Marian Hobbs.

Mr Prebble knows he has to work hard to avoid losing the electorate, a blow he suffered in 1993 when Sandra Lee snatched Auckland Central.

He has roved the country from Auckland to Timaru but his mind is never far from Wellington.

Last week was a classic mix of party and constituency work: an employment policy launch and public meeting in Timaru, a meet-the-candidates gathering in Wellington Central and a mayoral breakfast.

At a candidate meeting in Brooklyn, Mr Prebble faced a typically hostile reception.

An angry man marched towards him yelling "fascist," while a group of artists heckled and performed skits to disrupt him.

Even as other candidates spoke, Mr Prebble was the target of most of the harassment. During a Green Party warning about looming environmental disasters, someone yelled: "Prebble's an environmental disaster."

But Mr Prebble seemed at ease.

"I do enjoy those meetings," he said later. "I suspect they are not that important today, but I still regard them as part of the democratic process.

"People come along to see how the local boy can handle himself."

In Wellington Central, his message revolves around the work he has done as a local MP. But wherever he is, Mr Prebble never stops repeating the Act slogans.

"A hand up, not a hand-out ... Let's stop the Waitangi grievance industry ... There's too much red tape ... A low flat tax rate will create jobs ... We want truth in sentencing."

They are central to Act's strategy of "message discipline" - reminding voters over and over what you stand for.

It comes easily to Mr Prebble. He has the populist knack of pushing people's buttons by picking up issues and running with them mercilessly.