KEY POINTS:
Prime Minister Helen Clark is likely to feel the brunt of Opposition heat over the New Zealand First donation issue when Parliament resumes in three days.
It is apparent that she did not exert herself too much to get to the bottom of contradictions between what Winston Peters
and Owen Glenn said - except to get an assurance from Peters that his party did not receive a donation.
Last night, Peters said that his lawyer, Brian Henry - without telling him - accepted $100,000 from the billionaire towards the MP's costs in the Tauranga electoral petition case.
While the focus next week will be more on Clark, it may be somewhat lower than would be expected for a matter of such high stakes.
Peters' mother, Joan Peters, died yesterday and it would appear unseemly to be putting him through the grinder at such a time, even in his absence.
Peters was planning to leave the country on Monday for Singapore to attend the Asean Regional Forum with United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice so he will be absent from the House next week anyway, for one reason or another.
After Singapore, Rice will leave for Australia and Peters, if he goes, will fly home to prepare for her visit here in a week's time and to escort her to Samoa.
National has two reasons for not having pressed the issue very hard until now: it seriously risks alienating a potential coalition partner in NZ First, and it is mindful that a major domestic political conflagration involving the Foreign Minister might not be in NZ's interests just prior to a visit by the US Secretary of State. It can wait.
The Rice visit is important to New Zealand. It might be even more important in hindsight if Rice turns out to be McCain's vice-presidential running mate as she has been occasionally tipped to be.
While Rice as National Security Adviser to George W. Bush was at the centre of the Administration during the destructive unilateralism of the first term, the stigma that attaches to the defence chiefs Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz or Vice-President Dick Cheney have not stuck to her.
She is now on a non-stop global repair mission for the US, giving greater weight again to diplomacy and multilateralism.
She has overseen a strategic review of how the State Department actually operates in the world and coined a new term for the new strategic approach - "transitional diplomacy" - in which one of the pillars of which is to encourage greater regional collaboration.
It is only the third time in 24 years that New Zealand has had a visit from a Secretary of State.
George Shultz arrived the day after the 1984 election - bizarrely, to attend an Anzus meeting under the auspices of the defeated Government and to discuss Anzus with David Lange.
The last visit was by Madeleine Albright in 1998 in Bill Clinton's Administration but it was nothing special. It was a nine-hour drop-in. It was part of a 22-country tour in the year before New Zealand hosted Apec and was as notable as much for her shopping spree as anything.
Jim Bolger had visited the White House as Prime Minister in 1995, starting the thaw after the Anzus rift, but there was still a lot ambivalence about the relationship, given that National had not "fixed" the anti-nuclear blockage as the Americans had hoped.
Rice's visit is the first since the new relationship began in earnest after a review of it in 2005, a year into the Bush second term and three years after the invasion of Iraq.
The new era was formally recognised with a White House invitation to Clark in 2007; one with all the trimmings, unlike 2002, and an acknowledgement by the White House that it could live with New Zealand's anti-nuclear legislation.
The US is not stepping up its friendship with New Zealand out of the goodness of its heart.
Two of the biggest worries for the US in the Asia-Pacific region, and they are obviously linked, are China's rising influence and the US exclusion from groups such as the East Asia Summit, and Asean's 10 plus three group.
And on both issues, New Zealand is a good ally for the US - that is ally with a small "a".
Rice will meet Pacific counterparts in Samoa; many of the same men who met in Fiji this week in a bid to restore democracy.
Fiji Foreign Minister Ratu Epeli Nailatikau has been invited along with all Foreign Ministers of Pacific Islands Forum countries.
For Rice, the photo opportunity in Samoa may be more important than the Auckland one for what it says to Asia, especially North Asia, about the US reclaiming a place in the Pacific.
What has been happening between China and Fiji since the coup in late 2006 underscores the statement.
China is still the elephant in the Pacific, so to speak. No one accuses China of talking out of both sides of its mouth and it would be laughable, anyway, to accuse China of undermining Fiji's return to democracy. While the Western donors like NZ have been turning the screws on Fiji to get the country to return to democracy, Fiji has been testing out China.
China has obliged with aid skyrocketing since the coup, according to Fergus Hanson of Sydney's Lowy Institute who last month released research on China's secretive aid programme in the Pacific. Before the coup it was US$1 million ($1.3 million) a year. Last year it was US$167 million, including a US$150 million low-interest loan for infrastructure and resettlement programmes.
While China has given Western countries a sympathetic hearing about the need for donors to work collaboratively in the region, it has been quietly taking advantage of the situation for itself.
The advantage Rice has over China's top-level visits to the region are that her invitation list extends to all Forum countries, not just those that recognise China over Taiwan.
Peters said at the outset he wanted a greater presence by the US in the Pacific, and the Rice visit to Samoa is a priceless testimony to that.
Peters has certain bragging rights over the Rice visit, simply because it will happen under his watch. But the visit is happening primarily because the US thinks it is in its interests.
