John Armstrong: Home or away, Brash is losing

COMMENT

The National Party has an awful dilemma.

If it keeps Don Brash away from Parliament, it is slammed for doing so.

When he fronts up, he is being slaughtered.

Never was National's embarrassment more evident than yesterday.

With the House resuming after a one-week recess and opinion polls showing his party drifting off the pace, National's leader was under pressure to lift his game and eradicate the growing public perception that he is invisible in Parliament and cannot foot it in the bear-pit.

But by the time he walked out of the chamber after speaking in the imprest supply debate, Dr Brash may have been wishing he was invisible.

His colleagues had dutifully sat through a speech which they would have faintly hoped might be a morale-booster, but which Labour's acerbic whip Jill Pettis correctly summed up as passionless.


While Dr Brash was speaking, several National MPs, including Dr Brash's chief minder Murray McCully, felt compelled to complain to Deputy Speaker Ann Hartley about the frequency and volume of interjections from the Labour benches.

That said it all. No Leader of the Opposition worth his salt should need such protection. He is the one who should be making the hits.

But all the hits were landing on Dr Brash yesterday. He was a victim of what might be called "boomerang politics" - a term whose authorship should be attributed to Ron Mark.

The NZ First terrier suddenly barked "his boomerang won't come back" while Labour was tormenting Dr Brash for his Australian Financial Review article last week in which he claimed New Zealand was falling so far behind Australia in living standards that it risked becoming "just another Pacific Island state".

But Mr Mark was off the mark.

Dr Brash's boomerang had come back - smack into his face.

Labour exploited MPs' question-time to dish up patsies to its finance, labour and employment ministers so they could pour a bucketful of economic indicators over Dr Brash to prove New Zealand was outperforming Australia.

Labour's researchers had also been trawling through statements Dr Brash made while governor of the Reserve Bank, enabling Finance Minister Michael Cullen to delight the House with this gem from a speech Dr Brash made in 2000 to the Trans-Tasman Business Council:

"There are a great many fundamental differences between the two countries, so a different growth rate should be no surprise at all. This is neither good nor bad. It just means New Zealand is different in some respects."

But Dr Cullen was only warming up. As the House moved from question-time into the free-for-all imprest supply debate, he likened Dr Brash to a Cassandra-like figure wearing a sandwich-board declaring "the end is nigh".

"We're going to hell in a handcart, according to Dr Brash. It's certainly a Rolls-Royce handcart as far as most New Zealanders are concerned."

As next speaker up, Dr Brash was in dire need of redeeming himself.

What the House got instead was a dry economics lecture worthy of, well, a Reserve Bank governor.

As he left the chamber, Dr Brash's colleagues were left to reflect on a simple truth of politics.

When things are going well for you, how your leader is performing in Parliament matters not a jot.

When they are not, it matters rather a lot.