Frank Greenall: Trader John will do you a deal

TRADE-OFF: Prime Minister John Key during last week's visit to Rangitikei College.PHOTO/STUART MUNRO A-250915WCSMPM3

I HAVEN'T been in the Prime Minister's Beehive office lately ... but, apparently, if I had, I'd have noticed a distinctive piece of pounamu on display.

When the National Party led by John Key won the 2008 election, his sisters, Liz and Sue, wanted to mark the achieving of his boyhood dream of becoming PM with something special. So they presented their young brother with a work of sculpted pounamu symbolising the nation's highest peak, Aoraki Mt Cook.

Perhaps that chunk of greenstone is part of the reason Mr Key eventually allowed the Red Peak design into the final flag selection mix. Maybe he saw the Red Peak as mirroring the peak represented in the pounamu - the one he had metaphorically conquered. Although presumably he would have preferred a Blue Peak.

Mr Key's subsequent election victories marked him as a political phenomenon - already he is in a select band of prime ministers who have led their party to a third term.

Serving out this term will make him the fifth longest serving prime minister ever. With Labour still floundering, and the polls still buoyantly pro-National, he could well next be looking at a fourth term and eclipsing Kiwi Keith as the Nats' longest serving PM. But to what end, exactly?

Increasingly, questions arise regarding what kind of legacy he will leave. Increasingly, too, the answer seems to depressingly be that his legacy will be little more than ... well, that he was just one of our longest-serving PMs.

Richard Prebble, co-architect of the Labour neo-right economic reforms, astutely observed of him: "His strength is also his weakness. You can see [he] is a great trader - he looks at the world as a trader.

"My worry about him is that he sees everything as a trade."

In Trader John's words: "We're open for business." Never mind that the business might be in the fillets of endangered fish or on-selling toxic waste - if it brings out the colour of your money, then it's all good.

While we're trashing the environmental commons, you take your beguiling smile out to the world and extol our supposed "100% Pure" status. When an incredulous interviewer, whose homework shows that we have some of the most polluted rivers in the Western world, challenges you on this, you simply keep smiling and say, while that may be true, we're still cleaner than a lot others - and, hey, that entitles us to claim "100% Pure" as it's only aspirational and therefore okay to state as fact.

This, of course, is tantamount to saying that, because you scored a bit more in the exam than your lowly neighbour, you are entitled to claim a 100 per cent pass mark ... because, after all, it is only aspirational.

While the dumbfounded interviewer looks at you as if you are stark raving mad, you slip him a three-handed handshake and exit left on your way to an infomercial with Letterman. While everything is a trade to a certain extent, hopefully it is all to some longer-term good other than just remaining top of the heap.

Increasingly for Mr Key, the rows of rapidly changing numbers on small TV screens in currency trading rooms that were the raw data for his high-profit forex decisions have been replaced by focus group polling forays. If the lemons and cherries aren't lining up on the public fruit machine, then just throw some flags or pandas at it, pray that the ABs bring back the World Cup, and bugger the underclass and creeks.

Pork barrel politics is not new. But the context for us is that New Zealand is one of the few places left on the planet where the prospect of a truly sustainable economy, driven by true environmental integrity and alternative energies, is still attainable given the political will. And that integrity has the capacity to infuse all our major industries with an economic premium that would far eclipse what we get for flogging off non-value-added raw products.

A clean and green Brand New Zealand, but one actually true to label. And, gosh, our kids could even get to swim in the creeks again.