KEY POINTS:
Morning break is under way at Forest View High School in Tokoroa, but inside the library a small group of nervous senior students are skipping their interval.
Seated in a tight cluster of chairs, they watch intently as Prime Minister Helen Clark walks in clutching a big mug
of tea and makes her way to a chair where she sits down and faces them.
"Good morning, how are you?" she casually asks the students, who sit shyly and look uncertain what to say back.
Clark laughs, and there is an awkward hush for a moment as the informal question and answer session struggles to get off the ground.
Eventually the ice is broken by a question about Clark's background, but a tougher one is just around the corner.
A male student in the group pipes up and asks something on the minds of a good portion of the mill town in which he lives. "Does the Government have a plan to combat the high cost of living?" he politely asks.
The question - which Clark receives again in a slightly different way later in her visit to Tokoroa - is a sign of the economic challenge facing her as she endeavours to lead Labour to a fourth-term in government.
Clark's Labour administration has never before had to deal with such a chilly economic outlook during its eight years in power.
And it is in places like Tokoroa - which in an electorate profile rates 10 out of 10 at its centre for socio-economic deprivation - that the effects of rising food, mortgage, power and petrol costs are being felt the most.
Clark handles the questions with a multi-pronged response. It is a style that isn't reserved just for these students, but one she is using on her travels all around the country.
First she shows some empathy by acknowledging that the prices of some staple foods have risen faster than inflation, and petrol has zoomed up even more rapidly. "The family notices it in the car, and feeding teenagers who are always in the fridge," she says with a wry grin to the students.
Then she breaks into what sounds like an Economics 101 lesson as she tries to project an image of someone who understands what is happening and is capable of leading the country through tighter times.
"The key thing for us is running the economy carefully," Clark says, explaining that inflation remains a risk and the Government would prefer to see it slip back within the Reserve Bank's target band of 1-3 per cent.
Then she reminds the students that Labour has only just days before done something to help with one aspect of the financial pinch - it delayed the introduction of transport into the climate change emissions trading scheme and thereby put off a further hike in petrol prices.
"We decided because people are already using less (petrol) as prices are high we shouldn't push it up further," Clark says.
How Labour deals with cost of living issues in its Budget on next Thursday will be crucial to its chances of success at the election later this year.
Trailing behind National by 14.9 percentage points in the April Herald DigiPoll survey, Labour clearly needs a good Budget to get itself on the right track for the election campaign.
One way of easing financial stress will come through carefully guarded personal tax cuts Finance Minister Michael Cullen will unveil on Budget day.
A lot rides on the programme Cullen and Clark will present - as Labour well knows after it was ridiculed in 2005 for announcing so-called "chewing gum" cuts which gave people at the lower end of the spectrum just 67c a week extra.
Labour is keen to avoid public expectations running away on it ahead of the Budget, but it is well aware of the importance of the day.
As Clark emphasises to the Tokoroa students, it is a balancing act because the Beehive would like the Reserve Bank to be reducing interest rates, "so we have to be careful about how we budget".
Clark has made it her routine as Prime Minister to visit a town or city
outside Wellington on the Thursday of weeks when Parliament is sitting, and she tries to get around as many regions as she can during recess periods. It is all part of keeping in touch, keeping up a presence, and keeping an ear to the ground to sense the public mood.
Determined to never be caught out lacking a key fact or knowledge of something that is troubling everyday folk, Clark is receiving regular updates about everything from the price of milk to a loaf of bread and a litre of petrol.
Despite the gap her party faces in the polls, she does not appear to be finding herself subjected to vitriolic or even vaguely angry attacks during these days on the road.
It helps that the 58-year-old carries the immediate respect that comes with being Prime Minister of New Zealand for eight years.
That shows wherever she goes in Tokoroa, where people turn their heads and look surprised to see Clark walking through a schoolyard, or being driven along a suburban street in her big silver limousine, or sitting on the sofa bed of an 82-year-old woman who has just had a new clean-air woodburner installed.
It helps also that Clark and Labour appear well-liked in Tokoroa, where she is warmly welcomed at a Pacific Island church as "Aunty Helen", and where she is told by a Fijian woman that the community "will be rooting for you come election time".
Tokoroa is in the heart of the Taupo electorate which long-serving Labour MP Mark Burton won by a very narrow margin of 1285 votes in 2005.
The seat is seen by National as very much up for grabs following a boundary rewrite that means it will this year take in the more affluent town of Cambridge.
Clark knows, however, that it is not all about winning the electorate seat.
While she would love to do that, more importantly she needs the people in Tokoroa, who are viewed as dead-cert votes for Labour, to get out and actually cast their party votes her way on election day.
With that in mind, she reminds the people hosting her for lunch at the South Waikato St Lukes Pacific Island Church that they should have now received enrolment packs in the mail.
"We're hoping on the day you will come out and put two ticks for Labour as well so we can keep on doing the work," she says.
Her comment follows a remarkably upbeat off-the-cuff speech to the Pacific Island audience that is itself in happy mood after giving Clark a 10-minute demonstration of the low-impact aerobics it is doing to try to improve health.
People of all shapes, sizes and ages wearing green "Keep your body moving, Keep your body strong" T-shirts proudly go through their moves in front of the Prime Minister and look to her for a sign of approval.
Clark adjusts her tone to suit them. She cracks jokes about how generous her so-called light lunch was, and at how her colleague Burton was just referred to as "Papa Mark".
She says how pleased she is to see them keeping themselves healthy.
"I come with a message of hope," Clark says.
Then she rattles off a list of Labour's policies, including a warmer home project she will visit later in the day, the fledgling Schools Plus initiative, 20 hours free early childhood education, higher superannuation payments, lower doctors' fees and KiwiSaver.
Sure, she acknowledges, across New Zealand we have our problems.
But "there's overwhelming good being done".
Labour feels the election will likely be won or lost in the $40,000 to $70,000 income band, where swing voters could potentially be tempted to back either of the two major parties.
Late in her day in Tokoroa, Clark gets a reminder of the importance of not leaving behind the ones that fall below that band.
Her car swings into Jedburgh St, and glides past a series of plain houses that were built for NZ Forest Products workers as Tokoroa swelled in the 1950s due to the construction of the local pulp and paper mill.
Clark's car stops outside one little house where there's a hive of building activity; she goes in to see how a "warm homes and clean air project" is going.
Inside, she leans back on the sofa bed and looks at the modest surroundings of the proud elderly woman who has just had a new woodburner installed to keep her warm.
It will save her in power costs too, because it can help heat her water. And she might even be able to cook on top of it, Clark hears.
She looks around the room and is told there is huge demand for the retro-fits but that the people who are performing them can't go fast enough to keep up.
As cold people wait, respiratory problems remain common in the area.
Clark asks a few pertinent questions and files it all away.
She knows there is much more to be done, and not only for those who might decide the election.
