Cover Story
The 2007 leaders' interviews
by Bill Ralston
Both Prime Minister Helen Clark and National’s John Key believe they are on track to political victory. In separate interviews, the two leaders talk candidly to Bill Ralston about the battle for the next election, the state of the economy, New Zealand’s future – and each other.
It is either a measure of the hospitality of Auckland’s Stamford Plaza hotel or a sign of changing political times, but after I’d made a courtesy call to the hotel to let them know I would be chatting to National Party leader John Key in its flash new lobby bar, we were greeted by a couple of senior hotel executives and ushered to a luxurious private lounge upstairs. I have the feeling that if I had made the same request 10 months earlier and I had been with Don Brash, the Stamford might instead have called security and had us barred.
Key is confident. For good reason – he is on a roll. The polls make him and his party look like winners and we all like winners. As we sit in the comfortable chairs, I ask, “Did you anticipate it would happen this quickly?”
“Um … no,” he says with a laugh, then he looks around the room before adding, “if I am being brutally honest.”
Across town, upstairs in her narrow nondescript two-storey storefront electorate office opposite Eden Park, Helen Clark is more brutally honest. When I ask her about Key’s leadership ability, she points out that he is the fourth National leader she has gone up against as Prime Minister. “I think they’re all different,” she says, shrugging dismissively. “I think he would be the least substantial of any of them.”
Ouch.
“There’s a lot of window-shopping when you get a leader,” she says by way of explaining National’s current polling success. Clark professes not to be overly concerned about the yawning gap in the polls that leaves her party trailing so dangerously behind. She points out that Brash enjoyed similar polling leads three years ago, especially after his Orewa speech. “That Orewa speech which played the race card,” as she scathingly puts it.
According to Clark, when there is a leadership change, people have “a good look” at the new guy “but sooner or later you get a better balance of things”.
“You can’t stop a honeymoon, it’s going to happen. So the best thing you can do is get on with what you are doing, which is what I’ve done. I don’t think you’ve heard a bitter word pass my lips,” she says virtuously.
Clark continues, “I just got on out there. Promote the policy, keep out there connecting, listening, responding, getting your plans in place for the next term and stay very positive.” That is the Prime Ministerial recipe for dealing with a fickle public idly honeymooning with a tarty new Opposition leader.
Not surprisingly, Key disagrees with her assessment.
“If we had engineered these kind of poll results off the back of doing something tremendously dramatic, a la Orewa One [the Don Brash speech], you know that is the thing that’s thrusting you forward and, by definition, unless you can follow through on it will dissipate over a period of time.”
One could argue that when a party starts registering poll ratings higher than 50 percent, there is often no way to go but down. But these recent poll results, Key insists in response, come out of a much stronger, more enduring surge in public opinion. “The polls reflect two things. A growing and quite deeply felt dissatisfaction with the government. They really don’t want them to be there any more. And a much higher degree of comfort that National is looking like a party that is earning its right to govern.”
So, is the government losing the next election or National winning it? “It’s a bit like a seesaw. Partly you go up because they are going down, partly you are driving the momentum.”
I suspect that Clark sees it less as a seesaw than a brutal tug-of-war and she is determined that Labour keep applying more weight even though National keep trying to psych them out. “The way they’re trying to position themselves is they’re trying to get an image that it’s inevitable that they’re going to win. Well, that ain’t so,” she thunders.
“It’s going to come down to vision for New Zealand, leadership, who’s got the track record, who’s delivered, who’s got the best vision moving forward.”
Then she gets a little conspiratorial, “Always the thing about the National Party, the fundamental problem is that they’ve got the policy that dare not speak its name …”
‘Which is …?” I ask, genuinely confused.
She almost croons the next line, “Which is that what they’d really like to do is not politically saleable. They can’t stand there on the street corner and say we’re going to cut back on Super, we’re going to make you pay more for your health and education, and we’re going to trim here, there and everywhere, because people don’t want that. They rather like those things being built up. So basically they [National] are very dodgy when it comes to saying anything.”
This woman may say she is unfazed by the polls, but already she has quite obviously been spurred into overdrive along a campaign trail that will stretch all the way into late next year.
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