Editoral: Just how 'radical' can Shipley be?

This is the age of "branding," when a name, an image, is considered more important sometimes than substance. It may be true of consumer products that are hard to distinguish by their substance but it is emphatically not true of political parties. Whatever the phrase "radical conservative" might mean to the leader of the National Party, it is not going to help the party quickly recover its electoral appeal.

In fact, "radical" is probably the last word the electorate wants to hear for a long while. After 15 years of rapid economic change, Labour has come to power promising to do next to nothing except partially reverse a few of the recent reforms, and the public is mightily content. Labour is the conservative party these days and there is not much National can do to regain that mantle, if indeed it wants to. Jenny Shipley seems in two minds.

"Radical conservative," as she described the label to no doubt bemused party members at their weekend regional conference, is an attempt to straddle two constituencies. "It means reconnecting with our roots and expressing them in a contemporary way to which New Zealanders right across the social spectrum could subscribe," she said. National would be "radical" in the sense that the word is used among the young today, meaning fashionable. That must have been an enormous relief to the conservatives.

The operative word in Mrs Shipley's rebranding exercise was "conservative." As political parties invariably do when they lose office, National is going to tend to its roots for a while. The rural districts that lost population and locally based services, the small businesses and industry sectors that could not understand the previous Government's commitment to unilateral tariff reductions and global exposure - these are the sort of people National needs to reconcile. At the same time, National has become a younger party in recent years, so much so that Labour's victory in November raised the average age of Parliament.

While Jenny Shipley was explaining her terms to National members, the Labour Party president, Bob Harvey, was telling his party's weekend conference that membership needed to be bigger and younger.

National is not about to sacrifice its chances with the young for the sake of mending fences in its conservative constituencies, and both parties need to enlarge the number of New Zealanders taking an active interest in public affairs. But they will not do with labels, however "radical."

A political party in good shape does not need to characterise itself. Its policies and statements should define it. Political parties are not inert commodities that need to "branded" lest nobody notices them. Those with a presence in Parliament are constantly on public display and never far from popular discussion.

When a party starts clutching at labels - as National last did in the dying stages of the Holyoake and Muldoon eras - it is a sign that it is probably not living up to them. In those previous bouts of navel- gazing, National told itself it was a "liberal conservative" party, and in the final throes of Muldoonism it philosophised earnestly about freedom and private enterprise.

For the past decade National has never been in danger of an identity crisis. Global trends have run the party's way and they will continue to do so. Economic survival demands open, competitive arrangements in all activities and public policies that foster enterprise and initiative. National's political prospects will ride on the ideas it contributes to the country's welfare, radical or not.