KEY POINTS:
In public life, Mike Moore always was something of a loose cannon. David Lange, in his memoir My Life treated him more kindly than many of his contemporaries when he remarked that Moore was "impulsive and, in his enthusiasm, not always comprehensible".
His appointment to the premiership seven
weeks before the 1990 election - he replaced the spectacularly uncharismatic Geoffrey Palmer in a doomed attempt to head off the hammering the Labour Government was facing at the polls - was the mother of all hospital passes. His rhetoric during the campaign ("I'm talking jobs, I'm talking health, I'm talking education" was among his more memorable mantras) was irresistibly reminiscent of the triumphant cry of a possum trapped in the headlights of an approaching truck.
That was then. This is now and even Lange conceded that Moore, who was Director-General of the World Trade Organisation from 1999 to 2002, "rose higher in the international community than any other New Zealander". But this week Moore turned his attention from global affairs to weigh into the woman who took over from him as Labour Party leader.
In an article in the New Zealand Herald, Moore accused Prime Minister Helen Clark of reincarnating the "angry Robert Muldoon" by practising "the politics of personal destruction" and said that it was "a bit much" that Labour politicians who "went to exclusive schools [and] enjoyed a comfortable upbringing" were now trying to "put a blowtorch down National leader John Key's Y-fronts [and] calling him a rich guy".
He went on to launch a swingeing attack on everything from the number and competence of Cabinet ministers, to the value of Labour's coalition partners and the country's recent economic performance.
Moore's style, which displays no more regard for logical structure than for the rules governing the use of the comma, is not exactly measured. He admitted as much the next day, saying that "I just rattled this thing off, as I rattle columns off" - a slightly alarming admission from a lifelong Labour Party man who had just trashed the Labour administration. And predictably Clark shrugged it off with the unsmiling comment that "if I spent my life worrying about all the silly attacks people made, I'd never do my job." Progressive leader Jim Anderton, looking more than ever the supernumerary Government poodle, got stuck in, however, accusing Moore of being a bitter, hypocritical failure. He has reportedly challenged Moore to a debate on the matter, an event which, it must be hoped, will not go ahead for fear of the danger the combined carbon dioxide emissions would pose to the environment.
Clark and Anderton had to react the way they did in public. But if either of them has any interest in holding the reins of power beyond next year, in private they must surely be looking beyond Moore's scattergun style and assessing the substance of what he had to say.
Labour may not like it, but the fact is that many of Moore's random shots hit their targets dead centre. The co-ordinated Parliamentary attack on Key did him no damage at all but severely dented the Government's own credibility. The fact that the second wave of attacks, the queries raised about Key's multiple addresses which turned out to have no substance, was led by Pete Hodgson, whose health portfolio is full of far more pressing problems than the Opposition leader's domestic arrangements, simply compounded the offensiveness of the approach.
The PM may maintain a lofty distance from the Government's recent strategy but we may be sure she is driving it. Whether it is the politics of personal destruction or the rough-and-tumble of Parliamentary politics in an age where proportional representation makes for odd allies is a matter that may be debated. What is beyond dispute is that it is having a disastrous effect on the Government's popularity. In the latest Herald-DigiPoll survey, National has doubled its lead over Labour and could, if the results translated into election votes, govern alone.
The PM's office blamed the figures on the Benson-Pope effect but must surely know that, if the unlamented environment minister could alone have such an impact on the Government's electoral fortunes, it would have long ago been polling below the 5 per cent threshold. It may like to consider an alternative explanation: that Mike Moore has a point. Or two. And that what he thinks, many voters are thinking too.
