KEY POINTS:
SYDNEY - When I knew I was coming over to Australia for the last week of the election campaign, I pulled out the office copy of Bernard Lagan's book about the extraordinary rise and fall of Mark Latham, the Labor leader at the last election. It's called Loner: Inside a Labor Tragedy, (Allen and Unwin).
I thought he would be good to talk to him when I got the Australia about the election.
Bernie worked in the NZ Press Gallery at the time of the three Dicks (Long, Griffin and Harman) which spanned the Muldoon era and the Fourth Labour Government. It was before my time there but I got to know him over the years when he returned home to cover elections for the Sydney Morning Herald. He is now the Australia correspondent for The Times.
Having arrived in Sydney on Sunday morning at my brother Matt's place, I announced my plans for the next few days which included getting out to John Howard's Bennelong seat over the bridge in Sydney, heading down to Canberra for a few days, and I wanted to try to find Bernie Lagan in Sydney. Matt, Lauren, the kids and I then piled into the car and headed to an Italian restaurant in the Haberfield shops for Sunday lunch.
In one of those rather amazing coincidences, who should walk into the same restaurant but Bernie, who as it turns out, lived about two streets away from my brother.
It was the day after his wedding to Jane Nicholls, his partner of 10 years, and they and their two girls are off to New York soon where she will be editor-at-large of People magazine. (They have a gorgeous house in Haberfield for lease).
We did catch up last night to talk about the election. Murray McLaughlin came too, another legend in New Zealand journalism who made the 60 minutes doco For the Public Good if I recall correctly, on Labour Party funding and big business interests - over which there were several out-of-court settlements reported to be humungous.
He is up in Darwin now reporting for 7.30 Report, the equivalent of Close Up or Campbell Live.
Murray is convinced the Coalition is gone. Bernie is not so certain and wonders whether Australia will hesitate at the prospect of Labor governments in every state as well as at federal level.
Bernie sees everything happening in this election - the me-too-factor as a response to the Latham election where policy differences were masterfully exploited by Howard.
But Bernie said he had been wrong before. Like many people last election, he believed Latham's Labor would at the very least cut the Coalition's majority. Instead Labor went backwards, winning three fewer seats than before the election. (Latham no longer talks to him: the pair fell out over the book which ran views of Latham's ex wife).
The upshot is that Labor this time is minimising the differences, and making carefully selecting a few differences to target, like the unpopular Workchoices labour law reform. I haven't found an employee who embraces it.
The polls and headlines this morning would have made sobering reading for the Liberals: The tabloid Daily Telegraph has a 90pt heading "Libs at War," about back-biting in the campaign team, and the Sydney Morning Herald leads with the heading "Lib heartland slips away." It's about a poll predicting the imminent demise of the eminent Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull in Wentworth. Inside is a story about how Howard is losing the Korean and Chinese vote in Bennelong.
Rudd in campaigning in Melbourne today, and Howard is in Perth. I expect to see them in Canberra later in the week.
I'm in Bennelong now hoping to track down Maxine McKew on the campaign trail. I almost didn't get here. The cab driver in George St, central Sydney, was thrown by the request to take me a shopping mall in Bennelong. Where? I don't know where. Let's drive to that area, I said providing a map, and we'll look for a mall. Where? Anywhere. But where?
It turns out that the driver, from Bangladesh, is married to a Kiwi - half Maori, half Samoan and he visits New Zealand often. He is a Labor man through and through. He works full-time at reception in a hotel, and part-time driving and John Howard doesn't care about the poor and he tells lies.
He [the driver] works six days a week and his wife five. They are having two weeks holiday in Auckland at Christmas then four weeks in Bangladesh. It seems Australia has much better wages that New Zealand, it has a much better class of poor as well.
