It is halfway through the life of this Parliament and Helen Clark is planning how to still be in charge in the next. Political editor JOHN ARMSTRONG John Armstrong checks out how the Labour-Alliance Coalition is bearing up.
One afternoon late last month, a New Zealand High Commission car swept into the entrance of London's gleaming Millbank Tower.
Once Europe's tallest building, the monolithic 33-storey office block beside the Thames was used as the location for a 1975 episode in Doctor Who's struggle against one group of his many extraterrestrial adversaries, the hideous Zygons. But the only time-travel interesting the deadly serious visitor from New Zealand concerned what might happen at the end of next year.
On her way home from Crete, the Prime Minister had scheduled a five-hour stopover in London - long enough for a swift tour of the British Labour Party's headquarters, the command centre for Tony Blair's re-election campaign; long enough to bone up on fresh campaigning techniques and tactics for next year's fight with National and Act.
Helen Clark never takes her eye off the ball; she is relentlessly focussed on breaking Labour's unhappy mould, determined to win a second and third term in office.
Whereas other prime ministers have been tempted to turn a deaf ear to events back home while overseas, Clark is constantly on the phone to New Zealand wanting to know who impressed in Parliament that day and, more particularly, who mucked things up.
The Crete trip, however, was an apt illustration of how time in power slowly erodes a government's standing. As a new Prime Minister, Clark basked in the glow of last year's 85th commemoration of Gallipoli. A year on, coverage of the Battle of Crete anniversary was more low-key, upstaged by her own stuff-up as ministers back home struggled to contain the John Yelash affair, an Opposition-fuelled distraction that exposed Clark's contradictory stances on confidential payouts.
This is a vulnerable time for Labour. Midway through the life of a parliament, cabinet ministers can become lost in the detail of their portfolios. They have been long enough in the job to be prone to the arrogance of office and believe in their own infallibility. Bureaucrats fawn. Discipline loosens. Mistakes compound.
In Labour's case, the opinion polls are a recipe for complacency. The centre-right parties have not overtaken the centre-left since the last election. The gap narrowed briefly last October following the so-called "winter of discontent," only to widen again as Labour turned on its "charm offensive"with business.
Last month, the left's lead over the right was a hefty 12 percentage points - a trend maintained in this weekend's Herald-DigiPoll. No government has enjoyed such a consistent comfort-zone since the mid-1980s, when David Lange cruised to a second term.
Even cautious Government insiders now think it will take an unforeseen catastrophe to prevent Labour winning next year. However, National strategists argue that the public's perception of which party is likely to win the election - itself a voting determinant - will be shaped by which party is ahead in the opening months of 2002, not now.
However, as political commentator Colin James notes, National not only has to draw level with Labour, it must get five or so points ahead. This is because National has only the low-polling Act as a minor coalition partner, while Labour has both the Alliance and the Greens to grow the centre-left's vote.
Consumed by a presidential power struggle, National has so far shown no sign of doing that - the spat between John Slater and Michelle Boag is eclipsing any messages that National might want to send to voters.
Unless Slater accepts the inevitable and pulls out of the race, the platform of the party's July conference will be wasted. Opposition parties get few such opportunities to show the public what they stand for.
Time is marching on. True, Jenny Shipley is promising bold new ideas and Bill English is starting to set the fiscal boundaries for policy discussion within the caucus. But little in the way of new thinking has emerged, even in the form of broad planks. Senior MPs say "big picture" stuff and attractive alternative positions will start appearing in the latter half of this year, bringing a new dimension to their contest with Labour.
Clark is predictably vituperative. "The right is intellectually bankrupt. They have nowhere to go." Boag's campaign catchcry is more wounding. She says National is simply failing to reconnect with voters. That says it all.
The phone may well be off the hook, but, as the cliche intones, oppositions don't win elections, governments lose them. The need to stay connected with voters is not lost on Labour strategists, who will have the harder task of defending the Government's record, rather than attacking someone else's.
"Once a government is perceived to have stopped listening, it's fatal," says one Labour insider.
Hence Clark's mission to Millbank, where before this week's election some 300 staff and ministerial aides ran a high-tech 24-hour operation monitoring key media, checking campaign progress in marginal seats, coordinating mail-outs, and ensuring everyone sang the same song.
Blair also renewed his 1997 pledge-card, offering "five pledges for the next five years," including low mortgages, more teachers, nurses and police, plus a promise to raise the minimum wage.
Clark says New Zealand Labour will "almost certainly" follow suit, renewing its 1999 version with fresh pledges and a synopsis of Labour's economic vision. "It is a very useful way of highlighting the top priorities."
In the trade, this is known as presenting "deliverables" in an easy-to-comprehend fashion. The pledge-card is also a way of keeping contact with Labour's core constituencies - middle-income earners, pensioners and Maori - whom Clark has been ultra-careful not to offend. She may be acid, but the vitriol is poured carefully.
The Prime Minister is careful to stay close to audiences she wooed during her long years in opposition. The discrepancy over who got the community services card came down to a fear of upsetting a few superannuitants. They got the card. Poor workers - a far less vocal lobby - missed out.
This week Clark spoke to Grey Power in Winston Peters' Tauranga; there was another ministerial forum with Maori community leaders at Eden Park to follow ones in Gisborne and Christchurch.
A fourth business forum is planned for coming weeks. After last year's falling-out with corporate New Zealand, Labour may have ruined its chance of supplanting National as the partner of business. But the Coalition is determined to be seen as a friend.
Economic credibility is paramount with Clark - hence the austerity of this year's Budget. Competent economic management is the second leg in her election-winning double, the other being stable government.
Beehive sources, however, suggest the Coalition reached a crossroads last winter as business kicked up its almighty fuss. Clark became more of a driver of economic policy; social programmes began to take a back seat.
National's Bill English is more blunt. He sees Labour cynically pitching solely for crucial centrist, middle-income voters and turning its back on the poor. If so, Labour is muscling into National's traditional territory, forcing English and his colleagues to try to find other avenues to undermine Clark.
Quoting a string of her seemingly unshakeable approval ratings in recent polls, Clark claims National's sustained personal attacks on her are simply washing off. "The public doesn't give a toss as long as the country is well-managed."
That may not be quite so easy over the next 18 months. The Treasury has downgraded economic growth forecasts to 2.6 per cent in the year to next March - hardly spectacular stuff. With export prices high and the dollar low, critics argue the economy may be at the top of the cycle. Clark counters that all the doom and gloom about the American economy has yet to be borne out.
Apart from her volatile Maori caucus, Clark's other major problem is the Alliance, now revealing the strains of persistently poor poll ratings. Alliance officials were already conducting a formal mid-term stock-take of Coalition relations. But factions of Jim Anderton's party are now engaged in a kind of guerrilla warfare within the Government.
In part, this is Labour's fault. Clark has dominated the Coalition while Anderton has buried himself in his Economic Development portfolio. There has also been the usual big-brother reluctance to allow the junior partner breathing-space - and victories to crow over.
In the speech from the throne after the 1999 election, both coalition partners promised not to compromise the distinctive political identity of either and to act in good faith towards one another. So much for good intentions. Labour publicly frowned on the People's Bank, while the untidy wrangling over paid parental leave has negated any political dividend from its introduction.
The Labour hierarchy is optimistic that Anderton will use his weight to squash dissent within his party. But there is no expectation that the grumbling from less pragmatic, more hardline elements will cease.
Speaking from experience, National's Murray McCully argues the "ticking of the election clock" will erase Coalition goodwill as one of the partners realises it is heading for oblivion. "Stuff that is relatively easy to sort in the year after an election becomes incredibly difficult by the time you get into the last year."
The other source of friction is the Greens. The increasing likelihood of Labour being in formal coalition with that party after the next election will see the focus shift to likely compromises that the Greens might extract.
This week's bust-up over superannuation policy and the looming differences over genetic engineering, likely to flow from the forthcoming report of the royal commission, suggest the Greens will be a far less compliant partner.
Just as Shipley is vulnerable to scare stories about Act's influence on National, Clark will have to turn her mind to how she similarly deals with the Greens in the run-up to the election - and without shutting the Alliance out of the picture.
The other thing worrying Labour bosses is policy delivery. The Government has now unveiled most of its big initiatives - it talks of economic transformation, it has poured money into programmes helping Maori.
The Government's first year was taken up with implementing its more easily enacted pledge-card promises - income-related rents, restoring the floor under national super and so on. The pressure is now on to get some visible results from longer-term policies. The risk is that something else will fill the news vacuum - such as horror stories from patients waiting for treatment from cash-starved hospitals.
Clark has always talked of needing two terms in Government as the minimum necessary to transform New Zealand into an upmarket, high-tech economy and substantially raise living standards.
With the Budget still tight, however, election year could see Labour caught in a vice, squeezed between the high expectations of its supporters and the limited gains of the past 18 months.
Labour sets sights on second triumph
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