Worm upsets pecking order

By BERNARD ORSMAN

Labour and National tacticians hardly slept on Sunday night. Too much adrenalin and too few winks. Too much to do in the final week.

Labour leader Helen Clark was set for a week of positive campaigning. Labour's record. Labour's programme. Labour's leadership. Leave attacks on the Greens and New Zealand First to newspaper advertisements.

National leader Bill English was programmed away from the grainy images to straight-talking. Positive messages on the real issues. The economy. Education. Air New Zealand and Qantas.

If history was to repeat itself, hordes of soft voters who had drifted to the minnow parties would come home to the major parties in the last week.

Tracking polls carried out by the two main parties had been registering growing support for Peter Dunne's United Future Party since he turned the "worm" the previous Monday. National's polling was reading Dunne at 3 per cent to 4 per cent.

Dunne and his centrist (but leaning to the right), part-Christian party was factored in for the final dash. Strategists saw this vote as another group of soft voters to lure home.

National's backroom boffins were at Parliament and party headquarters in Wellington by 6am when they first read the Herald's snap poll showing Dunne's United Future had soared six-fold from 1.1 per cent to 6.6 per cent, thrusting him from nowhere to potential kingmaker.

Labour, too, had heard the figure before the great spotted kiwi bird call on Morning Report chimed the news to many New Zealanders.

Of concern to Labour was news that its own support had slumped from 46.7 per cent to 40.8 per cent in five days. In the words of the Herald's political editor, John Armstrong, "Goodbye Labour Government; hello National-Act-New Zealand First-United Future coalition?"

Toting up the numbers in the snap poll made a Grand Coalition of the Right technically possible, albeit remote in the extreme.

Richard Prebble and Winston Peters sitting around the cabinet table. I think not, even if there had been a marked shift from the centre-left to the centre-right with Labour slipping and the Greens heading dangerously close to the MMP wastebin.

The preparedness of the main parties could not be matched by the minor parties, which, after years of slog building what little support they had, were getting pummelled by Mr Invertebrate himself.

The Alliance's Liz Gordon accused Dunne of being a "right-wing clone of National", an evil doer who had opposed progressive Labour-Alliance policies - income-related state house rents, the renationalisation of ACC and the Employment Relations Act. A politician who had done his darndest to bring the Government down by voting against all three budgets and all confidence measures.

Green's co-leader Rod Donald asked how Dunne could be family-friendly when he voted for more casinos.

More peeved than anyone was Christian Heritage Party leader Graham Capill, whose fully fledged "Christian" party lies marooned in the polling doldrums of 1 per cent to 2 per cent.

Mr Capill said a pro-family politician like Dunne should not have abstained on the Prostitution Reform Bill, debased family life by supporting casinos and voted to legally recognise same-sex relationships.

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