KEY POINTS:
John Key looks like a prime minister, in the same safe, competent, pinstriped, clean-cut way that Kevin Rudd of Australia or Stephen Harper of Canada look like prime ministers.
And there can be no question that the new Prime Minister-elect has done everything possible to stamp his authority
on the job in the first week.
He has all but stitched together a governing partnership with three other parties; he has signalled the makeup of his Cabinet; he has held a highly symbolic meeting with leaders of six of the largest iwi groupings; and he has booked tickets to Apec and London for meetings this week with some of the world's leading statesmen and women.
At Apec in Peru, mere days after being sworn in as Prime Minister, he will draw on his experience in investment banking to advise those heads of state on how they should rescue the world from its economic downturn.
But when the shouting stops, what remains is for him to make a difference.
"It feels more exhilarating than strange," he confides, in his first newspaper interview since last weekend's election victory. "Just the ability to be able to make change and put a positive perspective on things."
Contrary to his rash claim a few months out from the election, Key is no Barack Obama. The Audacity of Hope, this ain't.
Despite the dire warnings of Phil Goff, the policy changes he proposes will not shake the country to its foundations. He will cut tax a bit more, free up business regulation a bit more, outsource public services a bit more.
But, like Obama, the changes he proposes are more about refreshing the relationship between the Government and the public. They are about trying to renew confidence in politicians, after the inevitable fatigue and distrust that sets in when a country has the same leadership for nine years.
"A lot of it is making sure that you don't get captured by the existing system and the way things have always been done," says Key.
"The public has voted for a change, and change can be a very positive thing. It's change in the way we engage with people, in the way we do things, in not being stuck in the historical mindset."
Like Helen Clark, what he lacks in vision and inspiration, he will make up for in dogged hard work.
In his first few years in Parliament, when the House rose for its lengthy lunch break and the ministers and MPs trooped over to the dire Copperfields Cafe in the Beehive, John Key often sat apart.
While other MPs would chat in party clusters, Key would grab a small table at the back on his own.
It was not because he was a loner. It was because he was swotting. He would sit on his own with his sandwiches and taxation papers, his tie slightly loosened and his shirt sleeves rolled up. He looked almost a little scruffy.
The 47-year-old's face has rounded out since, his hair greyed. He has learned to talk just to the side of the television cameras, and has developed a slightly set camera smile that seems to work for him.
At Merrill Lynch investment bank in London, they called him "the smiling assassin" as he made hundreds of staff redundant.
Yet there is a genuine warmth about John Key. You get the feeling that if you were about to be sacked, you'd want John Key to be the man who did it.
Of course, try telling that to some of the senior public servants in Wellington who anticipate a lurch to the right that could carry their jobs with it. Al Morrison, the director-general of the Department of Conservation, might have to prove his credentials to his new bosses.
Howard Broad has also previously faced criticism from National, though as police commissioner he is more difficult to get rid of.
But first, Key must prove that he can apply his much-vaunted experience in international finance to bailing New Zealand out of recession.
IT WAS from his mother that Key learned the business instincts that served him so well in Australia, Singapore and London, and serving on the foreign exchange committee of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
He says she taught him the importance of using your education and work ethic to rebuild, whether it be a shattered life or a damaged economy.
Ruth Lazar was the daughter of a prosperous Jewish leather merchant in Vienna, Austria, as World War II loomed. The family faced severe persecution in a country that was, at that time, just as unsympathetic to Jews as Germany. But 16-year-old Ruth escaped to Britain, speaking no English, just after Hitler annexed Austria in 1938, thanks to her aunt, Lottie Weiss.
Weiss, 38, paid a large sum of money to a British soldier for an arranged marriage.
Key says the marriage was never consummated, and Weiss never saw the man again _ but it was enough for her to gain British citizenship and bring out her family members.
Ruth Key, as she later became, never spoke much about the war to Key and his sisters, Sue Lazar and Liz Cave. So there are mixed accounts about whether her older brother, Herbert, also managed to escape to England, or died in Austria. Liz Cave understands that his Judaism sealed his fate when the Nazis arrived in Vienna.
Ruth married George Key, the son of successful English merchants, but George Key was not such a good provider as she might have hoped. In her words, he was a "hopeless" businessman.
The couple moved around the world to Auckland where they set up a restaurant in St Heliers Bay and a cafeteria in a milk factory, but the businesses made little money. "Dad's parents used to send money," John Key says.
When George Key died of a heart attack, Ruth took the three children to Christchurch to what her son now describes as the "infamous" state house. Growing up, the son of a solo mum in that state house, has become part of his political branding.
As she had done in London, Ruth Key rebuilt her life in Christchurch after her husband's death.
"Mum knew a couple of things: that education was a liberator, that was the thing they couldn't take away from you. And that you can and will face some real challenges in your life, that you ultimately get out of life what you put into it, that you will sometimes have to rebuild."
His is a story of the sort that the centre-right loves, a story of triumph over adversity. He is the man who pulled himself up by his boot straps, to become a multi-millionaire with a picture-perfect nuclear family in a Parnell mansion.
But the temptation among some to dismiss that rags-to-riches tale is churlish, for John Key's story is one of hard work and determination.
He manifested that in his jobs as a currency trader, rising to high levels in a brash business that some find innately distasteful. Big egos, big bonuses, big cars, big drinking.
Before joining Bankers Trust, he collaborated with that firm's New York office in some heavy-duty currency speculation. A 1987 run on the over-valued Kiwi dollar, led by Bankers' Trust of New York, panicked the Reserve Bank of New Zealand.
How can he go from betting against the New Zealand dollar to taking charge of our economy?
"In one sense I'd say, that's just part of working for any sort of company," he says. "It's important to understand what your responsibilities are. My responsibilities then were to run an efficient foreign exchange operation, and I did that.
"My responsibilities are vastly different as Prime Minister of New Zealand, and I intend to carry those out in a way that New Zealanders would expect of their Prime Minister.
"I don't have mixed loyalties," Key says. "I understand exactly where my loyalties are."
Does he have any regret or guilt about his currency raids? "No, I personally think no one's bigger than the market."
Last week, two days after being elected Prime Minister, Treasury officials presented Key with a paper that shows that New Zealand is not bigger than the market, either. It forecast that the economy is likely to suffer from weaker export demand, lower commodity prices, lower housing values and weaker confidence. Unemployment will rise to 5.7 per cent. Tax revenues over the next three years will drop by an extra $2.1 billion.
Key says he know about rebuilding. He may have a lot of it to do.
