Editorial: Lukewarm outpourings

OPINION: The contents of the teapot tapes were pretty well stewed by the time they were released online.

NZ First leader Winston Peters, on our collective behalf, had long since sifted through the tea leaves of the recording.

It was made, accidentally he says, by cameraman Bradley Ambrose, and captured Prime Minister John Key's conversation with ACT party member John Banks after the media had been shooed from their their table during what was intended as a purely ceremonial pre-election benediction at a Newmarket cafe.

If the legality of the tapes is still a matter of contention, the malice behind the timing of this release is unmissable. It was a case of pouring cold water, or lukewarm anyway, over public interest in Mr Key's state-of-the-nation speech.

It's questionable whether the unseen hand that released that tape really need have bothered.

As it turns out, that speech was more resolute than revelatory.

You could say that the Prime Minister had disappointing news for anyone who might have harboured the happy expectation that getting us back into surplus in 2014-15 would be in no way imperilled if the global economy were to spiral downwards. Otherwise, plans like oil and gas exploration, the sell-down of state-owned enterprises and state-sector reform are still, sure enough, mountaintops the Government fully expects to ascend.

All of which does, admittedly, matter more in the grand scheme of things than the not-so-titillating tattle of the two politicians saying pretty much what we would expect them to say, but less daintily.

That was Mr Key's point. His insistence that his complaint to the police about the recording was in response to the "tabloid" tactics of invading a private conversation, rather than sensitivities about the contents, is a smidgin more plausible now.

Only now, however, has he apologised if he caused any offence to older New Zealanders for one recorded comment, linking their own mortality rate to Mr Peters' political fortunes.

Asked about this, he says that Mr Peters' support base is typically represented as older people, and that older people do at some point die.

Both of which are true. It's not as if Mr Key's apologising for breaking that sorrowful news to anybody, any more than he is suggesting that he misspoke and doesn't really see things in such terms. He is just saying that had this not been a private conversation, he would have worded it less bluntly.

On a purely dispassionate level, people would understand this. But you can forgive older people for being not quite so dispassionate that they really appreciate their impending and regrettable demise being portrayed as having quite so much of a silver lining for Messrs Key and Banks.

One of the stronger reactions to the tape's contents was prompted by Mr Key's expression of disapproval for the negative tactics and personal attacks. You might think that this is exactly the sort of comment an electorate might want to hear from any of its politicians. The difficulty is that most MPs, and their strategists, either adopt negative techniques or, at least, indulge them.

If anything, that part of the teapot tapes might yet be the one Mr Key is reminded of most often throughout the coming year, when those upcoming on-the-record political debates turn nasty.

- © Fairfax NZ News