By PETER CALDER
on the hustings
Fred Gore's got a brolly in the car, he says, but he can't be bothered with it because it gets in the way. So as Thursday morning's horizontal showers lash Green Bay, he pads along Cliff View Drive with only a threadbare parka for protection.
The wind has flipped the rosette pinned to his sleeveless pullover so the party logo is invisible. Dripping, he stands in the open doorway, and declines the offer to step inside.
"Bit wet," says the 74-year-old, waving a hand at his slip-on shoes and soaking trousers.
But it's not too wet for him to do what he came for, opening the folder to the list of street addresses and trying to write on its waterlogged pages.
"Y'on the roll?" he asks, or "Can I be a little bit cheeky and ask you: if an election was held today which party would you vote for?"
Fred Gore likes the answers at the first few houses. At one, the door is answered by a woman who says she is a "card-carrying party member."
Next door the cheerful occupant proudly announces that the household's three voters will all give two ticks to Labour.
The householder tries to make out whose colours are on the back-to-front rosette. "Who are you?" he says. "Oh, Labour. Just as well I said that then, isn't it?"
Mr Gore pads off down the driveway with a gleam in his eye - finding one of your own is a small but significant triumph.
There's a moment in Tony Sutorius' excellent documentary film Campaign, about the race for Wellington Central in 1996, when James Austin, the National candidate's campaign manager, sums up the nature of his work:
"Campaigns don't win elections. They just boost the morale of your supporters."
That cuts no ice in the Glen Eden office of the Titirangi Labour candidate, David Cunliffe, as Mr Gore and fellow canvasser Murray Jones gather up their pamphlets for the morning's work. There's no sign of low morale here.
"Our experience is that most people make up their minds in the last few days," says Mr Jones. "And their biggest grievance is that they never have any contact with anyone."
Mr Gore, whose canvassing days go back to the 1972 campaign which put Norman Kirk in power, has been up since 6 am, getting rid of some leftover pamphlets along Portage Rd, and he reckons the rain won't amount to much. He remembers a fortnight back being caught in a shower with 400 leaflets left to drop.
"I thought, 'Dammit. I'm going to do it'," he says. "Well, by the time I got home my shoes were full of water and I was wet through."
Up on Cliff View Drive, Mr Gore is unfazed as a confirmed Act voter, a young mother of a toddler, politely declines to support proposals to increase taxes for high-income earners. He makes his marks on the sodden paper and marches off into the rain again.
"Everyone has their dreams and aspirations," he says gently, knowing his job isn't to change minds, but just to give changeable minds something to think about.
"Yep," he says, as gusts of rain tug at his coat, "it's not a bad job on a nice day."
