Beware the limelight turning sour

POLITICAL WEEK - BY TRACY WATKINS

OPINION: What's John Key got that Kevin Rudd and Barack Obama don't have? It's not charisma or good looks, even if Mr Key was voted the country's sexiest politician.

Mr Obama certainly has those attributes and he went from hero to zero in under a year. It's not the Midas touch either. Mr Rudd is alone among Western leaders in steering Australia through the financial crisis without slipping into recession but his opponent is now breathing down his neck on some polls with an election just around the corner.

Mr Key, on the other hand, has sailed through ministerial scandals, a middling economic record and accusations that his Government lacks both a vision and a purpose (and that's only what National's traditional friends are saying) – and all the while, there has been barely a dip in his own and his party's record popularity.

From inside "the beltway", his Government's political management might more often than not look untidy and unfocused and its penchant for screaming U-turns whenever policy gets contentious seem likely to test even the most credulous supporter. But like the answer to questions about the meaning of life in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy – 42 – National always has a ready rejoinder. It's 55 – the number around which its poll ratings have pretty much orbited since the election 16 months ago.

It makes criticising National's strategy and performance a particularly risky business for those of us whose job it is to analyse such things. By conventional standards, for instance, Mr Key's government appears to have made a hash of its political management on at least two fronts in recent days.

Digging up the conservation estate – or at least the bits of it that promised to contain a seam or two of worthwhile minerals – was No2 or 3 among National's economic step-change talking points earlier in the year. But somewhere between then and now the Government appears to have suffered if not cold feet, then a case of the willies, over the size of the fight it might be buying to dig up parts of Great Barrier Island and Coromandel.

A discussion document originally due sometime last year and then in February has been sitting on desks for months while heads were scratched over the best way to minimise the fallout, with the predictable result that it was eventually leaked to Forest & Bird – predictable because it should have been obvious that sitting on a report as contentious as this one for so long was always going to be risky.

It left Mr Key no choice but to start back-pedalling on the policy even before it had got to the discussion document phase. Untidy? Of course. Just like the U-turn by Steven Joyce over his review of the pensioners' SuperGold Card before the ink had dried on the press release announcing the terms of the review.

But you can probably take it to the bank that National will still be sitting somewhere between 50 and 55 per cent in the polls in a month's time. So like the boy who cried wolf, it makes commentators wary of railing against the Government's failings in political management too often. It sounds more than a bit precious and decidedly out of touch when the majority of voters clearly think the Government is handling things just fine.

Is it because Mr Key is the sort of guy who can neck a bottle of beer in the presence of royalty without embarrassment that does it for him? Or the contrast between his own laid-back, no-drama approach and Helen Clark's more rigid, take no prisoners management style?

Or is his greatest strength what his opponents see as weakness – that is, the desire for his government to be liked? Or, put another way, an ability to spot where public opinion is likely to fall on an issue and get there before it, even if it means the occasional messy and not particularly credible U-turn. Because the public clearly doesn't care how he got there – that's the sort of thing only we insiders fret about. The polls would suggest that voters don't care about the journey at all, so long as they are comfortable with the destination.

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The problem, of course, is that it has made some within National feel all too bullet-proof. Across the Tasman, where Mr Rudd's equally long honeymoon with Australian voters was brought to an abrupt end by a change of leadership within the Liberals and a disastrous home insulation policy, younger MPs are apparently having to be counselled by older hands as they face, for the first time, the prospect of losing.

Like their Australian counterparts, any sort of revival by Labour at the moment would come as a rude shock to those among Mr Key's MPs who have got used to assuming the Treasury benches are theirs for a good few years yet.

There is nothing too much to trouble them now. Former Labour leader Mike Moore used to say of parties that were in the doldrums that voters had the phone off the hook. And there are few signs that voters are ready to put the phone back on the cradle for Mr Goff yet, especially while he keeps his guns trained on the centre ground – where Mr Key reigns supreme – as opposed to skirmishing runs into potentially more fertile ground on Labour's Left.

Mr Goff's ambitious and talented back bench – the likes of Grant Robertson, Jacinda Ardern, Chris Hipkins, Phil Twyford and Kelvin Davis – will probably force him there once he bows to the inevitable and elevates them to his front bench (the equally talented David Shearer should also be there, even though he is from a different spectrum). But even that may not be enough.

Like the Australian Liberals, who had two goes at it before they found the right man in Tony Abbott, it will probably take a change of face before Labour is back in with a chance.

Until then, Mr Goff, along with Mr Rudd and Mr Obama, might want to make a plea that, whatever Mr Key has got, they'll have some too.

- © Fairfax NZ News