Labour's only possible chance of winning the general election is to hope it can nobble National's John Key by exposing him as a lightweight.

Until now he really has seemed to be a Teflon man. No matter how much dirt is thrown at him, nothing seems to stick. I suspect it has nothing to do with his political skills, but more to do with a growing mood that voters want a change at the top.

But that doesn't stop Labour from trying. When in a radio interview Key voiced a fairy tale version of our country's history, Helen Clark and Michael Cullen couldn't contain their glee. Key apparently suggested that New Zealand was founded on a mutual love and respect between Maori and Pakeha and there was never a cross word between the two.

Labour couldn't believe its luck and harangued the hapless Key as a simpleton with less than a child's grasp of the country's history.

The potentially devastating attack was somewhat derailed when Key claimed the radio station unfairly edited his interview and cleverly, to close the matter down, laid an official complaint about the item.

National's Gerry Brownlee found past comments from Cullen that he claimed were similar to what Key had said.

From now on any mistake, real or imagined, that makes Key look inexperienced or ignorant will be jumped on. If Labour can raise enough doubts about Key's competence it might have an outside chance of wooing enough people back before election day.

This incident does raise the question of how much most of us know about our history. Despite the best efforts of authors such as Michael King, James Belich, and Chris Trotter, most of us are pretty ignorant.

Like Key, we all have a sanitised, short and biased version of history. Mine goes something like this.

Before the Europeans turned up, Maori, like most of the world at that time, spent their leisure time raiding each other's territory, killing and pillaging the luckless inhabitants.

Most negotiating with the early European settlers was over how hapu leaders could get their hands on muskets to give them a competitive advantage. Apparently shrunken heads were the best currency for guns. Market forces were all the rage - more heads got guns, more guns got more heads, and so on. In the Far North, my ancestor Hongi Hika managed to get himself 100 muskets and kill more Maori in one excursion than all the deaths on both sides combined during the Land Wars.

With the war parties doing their thing and the pox brought in by the Europeans, Maori were pretty much screwed by the time the missionaries tamed them with the white man's religion. The whalers and sailors had spent the earlier years raping and stealing land from the locals.