KEY POINTS:
Mr Common Sense wears snappy braces for a commonsensical reason.
"Otherwise my trousers fall down."
A belt would not do, United Future leader Peter Dunne says, "because I'm an odd shape in that the top half of my body is disproportionately longer than the bottom half, so belts
on trousers have a very unfortunate effect."
This mild wardrobe eccentricity and his cowlick hairstyle are about as wild as Dunne, Minister of Revenue, gets.
He says "boring" is the most common thing he hears about himself.
"No one has actually said it to my face. But every time I pick up a newspaper or magazine, it's there. It's like my name is Peter Dunne, brackets, boring."
This is "silly".
"I do the same things most people do. I like to watch sport, I like to spend time with my family, I like to go out and socialise at good restaurants. That's me. If that's boring, then that's the whole of New Zealand."
Dunne prefers words like "stable and reliable".
These qualities have seen United Future eke out its political survival by being part of confidence and supply agreements with various governments for eight of the 11 years since MMP came into being.
But of late, the political life of the man who has held the Ohariu-Belmont seat since he entered Parliament as a Labour MP in 1984 has been distinctly more lively.
A couple of weeks ago, in a speech to the Tawa Rotary Club, he accused Labour of "wandering eyes" and of ignoring United Future so it could better woo a strongly polling Green Party.
He attacked National's deputy leader Bill English, describing him as an "all too tried and found out deputy leader".
He accused John Key of hubris by supposedly mentioning a landslide election victory, even though Dunne himself had said in his Tawa speech that "it seems the next election is National's for the losing".
He accused Helen Clark and National of being "insensitive and offensive" for speaking out over the death of Folole Muliaga.
He's also had to deal with the defection of one of his three MPs last month after Gordon Copeland left to become an independent.
Dunne claims his "informed criticism" in the Tawa speech was not the threat to leave Labour painted by the media, nor a panic-stricken response to Labour's low polling as Winston Peters claimed.
He has an alibi: he wrote the speech on Anzac Day, long before the roll of polls showing National with leads of more than 20 percentage points over Labour. Nevertheless he was making unexpected waves.
Act leader Rodney Hide, who knows all about living on the margins of electability, can see why Dunne is starting to get noisier.
"John Key has taken the National Party so close to the centre that you can hardly fit a tissue paper between his position and Helen Clark's on any issue. And there's Peter Dunne trying to sit between the two. It's a very tight spot. Everybody is in there except for Act and the Greens.
"I think both Winston Peters and Peter Dunne are getting anxious that they don't want to sink with Labour and so they're saying, 'Look at us, look at us, we've got options'. That's just a bit of self-preservation."
He says Dunne has options. "Peter can work with anyone."
Dunne refuses to say who he'd prefer to work with, because if he did so, "then what would be the point in voting for me? Why not just vote for them?"
A strong advocate of lower taxes, he supports National's line on economic issues, but Labour's on social issues - health and education.
But Labour is "too loose with the cheque book," while National is "flinty" and "hard-hearted".
He's hugely impressed with Key, who he describes as "far more astute, far more in tune and I think unlikely to make the same mistakes both Dr Brash and Mr English made when they were leader".
He thinks Labour has a better grip of the machinations of MMP.
"But the signs are positive. This is like lining up the ingredients of the cake. You don't know what the cake's like until it's actually cooked but the ingredients look pretty good."
It's safe to assume Dunne will get back in - the Ohariu-Belmont electorate has been in his hands since 1984.
Politically and personally, Dunne sees himself as part of the "solid, uncomplaining block" of middle New Zealanders he says he represents - "those who are the mortgaged, certainly families, parents, people who worry about the bread and butter issues".
He agrees it is slightly problematic that few among that solid, uncomplaining mass seem to actually vote for him - just 2.7 per cent in 2005. In fact, few seem to know what he stands for at all.
New Zealand First rides hard on immigration and law and order, and soft on superannuitants.
With United Future, Dunne says, there's freedom and justice.
It can be argued that's little to stick in the craw of voters but there's nothing for them to grab and hold dear.
Dunne acknowledges, "Our greatest strength is perhaps our greatest weakness. We are reliable, we are safe, we are secure, we are steady. The moment we say that to secure more popular support we've got to go out and indulge in populist stunts, then we prove we are unreliable, unsteady, unsafe - the opposite of the very things that are our selling points."
He insists he has bottom lines.
His first core bottom line opposing "any threat to New Zealand's ongoing democracy" is so grand as to be redundant.
"If you want a specific, I would have found it very difficult to be part of a government that had wanted to send troops to Iraq. So there are specific issues that crop up and you say that is a bridge too far."
He couldn't work with any far left or far right government. He means, say if Act was the main governing party, or the equivalent of Jim Anderton's old Alliance Party which wanted to "tax everything that breathes and socialise the rest".
Hide says Dunne's approach in discussions with the occasional coalition of smaller parties over things like the sedition bill, the Births, Deaths and Marriages Bill and the bad behaviour of MPs has been straightforward.
"He would explain his position, listen to others and we'd work through to a joint position. He wasn't stubborn or doctrinaire, which is a good thing."
Hide admired his approach at the last election, when Dunne made it clear he would talk first with the party with most votes.
"What I approved of was that he didn't mislead anyone. He didn't play one off against the other."
Dunne has sworn off his favourite sport of bagging the Greens, who he has previously described as "these weird people who promote psychoactive drugs and yet are horrified by a GE spud".
Last election he refused to be part of any Labour deal in which the Greens held a Cabinet post, but now Green MP Keith Locke also describes him as straightforward to deal with, especially this year since Dunne quit "using epithets that weren't warranted".
If these former foes are now sometimes friends, then he also has friends who have become foes.
Copeland, whose name Dunne does not utter, is referred to variously as "our dear recently departed" and a "recent act of treachery".
Copeland wasn't the first to leave from the Christian-based Future New Zealand Party, which merged with United in 2000.
Larry Baldock, a stalwart of the party who was an MP in the 2002 term, walked with him, intending to set up a new Christian-based party.
Just before the 2005 election, Paul Adams also quit the party to stand, futilely, as an independent.
All left reasonably politely without name calling but clearly perturbed by Dunne's refusal to beat the Christian drum and instead distil Christian values into broader concepts like "family".
Now Dunne alludes to the shedding of those elements of the party as having been for the long-term good.
He's promising more va-voom in his policies, freed from the "more rigid" influence of the old Christian Democrats.
So he's developing policies "in tune with our general brand, but, to be blunt, [that won't] have that staid look about them that I think some of our approaches in the past have had".
"We are not seeking to be the nation's moral guardians."
So he will head into the next election armed with these new policies, and his lists of "the things we can achieve, and our record".
And of course he will have his spear of common sense which worked so successfully in 2002, when he charmed the worm in the television leaders' debates .
It took United Future to the dizzying heights of 6.7 per cent of the party vote - up from 0.54 per cent in the 1999 election - prompting commentator Colin James to note: "Who would have thought it? But this is Wonderland and you are Alice. This is MMP."
Dunne went back to Parliament that year with eight in his caucus only to lose five of them in the 2005 election.
He now blames the tight race between Labour and National for squeezing his party. His 2002 impact was also partly because he was a novelty - it was the first leaders' debate to pit the smaller party leaders against the large. But it also went wrong because he let go of common sense by taking TV3 to court over its attempt to block Dunne and Progressives' leader Jim Anderton out of the leaders' debate.
"I assumed incorrectly that there would be the latent Kiwi support for the little guy taking on the big guy, that we would be seen as the little guy that's triumphed in the face of adversity. Instead, I think a lot of people thought 'who the hell do you think you are, daring to take on TV3?"'
Dunne was 30 when he entered Parliament in 1984. He's now 53.
He admits to only one niggle of regret at having left Labour in 1994 to set up the then United Party.
"I've never thought about rejoining, but at a personal level when Labour won the 1999 election I briefly thought if I'd stayed there I'd have been a key part of that team.
"That was a brief moment of regret, but I quickly recalled all the baggage that goes with it."