KEY POINTS:
Much as the National Party tries to make light of the leak of its policy announcements to Labour, it is not a good look. Not a good look for a group that could be governing us within a couple of months. Labour says the policy statements were leaked
by an insider; National's leader, John Key, says there was no leak, and they must have been left somewhere accidentally. We are left to choose, therefore, between disloyalty or incompetence. Neither explanation inspires confidence.
If it were not for Winston Peters, National's troubles would be a subject of much more attention of late. But the media need make no apology for their priorities. The Peters case has moved beyond the hypocrisy of his populism to questions of public honesty, but inquiries will take their course. National must be gasping at its good fortune, but its more innocent difficulties should not be ignored.
The timing of a major party's policy releases are a vital element of its election campaign. The announcements are normally phased over several weeks so that each might capture attention for a day or two and enable the party to keep the initiative through the campaign. Events will be co-ordinated with the topic of each policy and many will be designed to second-guess their opponents and upstage them.
So vital are they to the shape of a three- or four-week campaign that it is a wonder Labour has used its windfall this early. It could have waited until the election date was announced, or indeed until the week before the campaigns open, to throw National's plans into disarray. To release them now suggests Labour is anxious to divert attention from the Peters scandal if it can.
In public, Mr Key may be shrugging off the embarrassment of having so many of his policies distributed by Labour's Trevor Mallard but behind closed doors Mr Key and his campaign strategists will be fuming at the disruption to their campaign diary and fretting about what to do now. They could, of course, simply re-release the policies on their planned schedule with a bit more razzmatazz than they would have otherwise needed. Theirs would not be the first campaign to try to sell the same sausage with a different sizzle.
And there is not much meat in the policies anyway, or not much that is distinctive. National's climate change release by Mr Mallard last weekend suggests the party would make such minor changes to Labour's emissions trading scheme that National's promise to have the work done within nine months of taking office has become more credible.
But now the party would come to power with serious questions over its competence or cohesion or both. A well-organised, united caucus with policies it believes in does not leave a pile of them lying about to be taken, let alone slips them to its opponents. A complacent or divided caucus contains members who might do such things, especially if the policies are so mundane they seem hardly worth guarding.
Reportedly, National's positions are being decided these days by a small group of MPs and advisers close to the leader rather than by the caucus committees of yore. Policies made thus are less likely to reflect a close and considered acquaintance with the subject and more likely to be a grab-bag of resolutions that will be superficially popular without binding the party to anything very difficult.
Coming close on the heels of deputy leader Bill English's musings to a hidden microphone and Maurice Williamson's candour on road tolls, Mr Key's leaking ship leaves him looking less than in command. If he cannot impose more discipline on his crew during the lead-up to an election campaign, what might happen when the election is safely past? That is the worry.