Quotes of the Day
Peter Atkins is weary and a little miffed. As usual, he's been up since dawn, fishing for a living off the coast of Kaikoura, a town in the north-east corner of the South Island. Blast, it shouldn't be this cold in October. And seagulls keep pecking at the crate-loads of hoki stacked on the deck of his boat. He's also been let down by a helper who's scampered before the day's work is done. Which gets him started on how, as he sees it, the government favors certain types of people. "Basically, people who haven't got a lot," he says. "But I haven't got a lot either. I've got a big mortgage and I work really hard — 70 or 80 hours a week — and they take a helluva lot of tax from me. But I never seem to see much for it." At this moment, the chill wind feels like a dark foreboding for the nine-year prime ministership of Helen Clark.
With up to 2.9 million New Zealanders about to vote in the Nov. 8 national election, Clark's Labour government is in strife. Having trailed the John Key-led National Party by as much as 18 points during the campaign, it looks ripe for the kind of electoral execution to which all long-term governments are vulnerable — the kind where voters decide they're sick of the sight of you. Days out from polling, Clark's best hope rests in the vagaries of the country's Mixed Member Proportional voting system, which make it unlikely that either major party will form a government on its own. Wooing minor-party support when the pressure's on has been a Clark knack. On election night, however, if the numbers fall as badly for Labour as some pollsters are forecasting, her renowned negotiation skills will be worthless.
Should New Zealanders decide to discard their 58-year-old Prime Minister, they will do so largely without relish. Aiming to gauge the nation's mood by traveling the country to speak to men and women from all walks of life, TIME found that while many are fed up with her government, nearly all concede a grudging respect for Clark. "She hasn't dropped a pass," says Stuart Wright, a sheep and potato farmer in Sheffield, west of Christchurch. Like Wright, Ken Arthur, a winegrower in Blenheim at the top of the South Island, wants Labour ousted. But he respects the P.M. as a straight talker. In 2003, Clark declined to involve New Zealand in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. "I would have to say she did well there," says Arthur, who served for 30 years in the Royal New Zealand Air Force. "I didn't agree with her at the time. But history has shown she was right."
Big Sister
Other right-leaning voters acknowledge what they see as Clark's Thatcheresque toughness and command of detail. But for many, these traits don't compensate for a government they see as increasingly paternalistic. Something like public outrage erupted in early October over a draft plan requiring that low-pressure shower heads be installed in new homes over a specified size, a trifle in itself but part of a wider narrative broadcast by anti-Clark forces that New Zealand has become a nanny state. It's a perception strongest in rural areas, where many farmers feel suffocated by bureaucracy. Sometimes, their grievances sound more like longing for a bygone era, when farmhands weren't glued to their mobiles and trampers couldn't expect a payout for injuring themselves on private land. But it's also a case of where there's smoke there's fire: Clark could never be mistaken for a proponent of small government.
As a threat to her rule, the cry of "nanny state" may be more potent than the weakened state of the country's $NZ150 billion economy. Its slide predates the global financial meltdown, with Treasury announcing back on Aug. 5 that the country was in recession. It was around this time that inflation hit an 18-year high and petrol passed the $NZ2-a-litre barrier. Like all shrewd incumbents, Clark has tried to turn bad news to her advantage: "I have the experience, the judgment and the skill set which can carry our country through what is the worst international financial crisis for more than 70 years," she said in a televised debate with Key on Oct. 14. But many New Zealanders are buying National's line that the Clark government squandered the boom times by granting only a single round of tax cuts in nine years. Consequently, New Zealand's best and brightest are fleeing the country in droves (1 in 4 of its university graduates lives overseas) for places like Australia, where wages are one-third higher.
Because Key's background is in finance, he's taken on the air of a man for the times. Born in 1961, Key hadn't long started school when his father died from a heart attack. His immigrant mother raised him and his two sisters in a state house in Christchurch. Though money was tight, young John excelled at school and university, and in the 1990s made a fortune as a foreign-exchange trader. Recruited by National in 2001, he won the newly created Auckland seat of Helensville the following year. By the end of 2006, he was party leader. It's a story very different to that of Clark, who's spent her adult life in lecture theaters and the corridors of power. "I think he [Key] would be great for the country," says Auckland dentist Allen Baker, who calls himself a centrist and articulates a common view of Key's credentials: "He's been in the real world. He understands business. I think the country desperately needs him at the moment."
Key's borrowed from the playbook of many a successful challenger, aligning himself with the status quo where it suits, veering from it only on sure-fire perennials like getting tougher on criminals and providing more tax cuts. He's made himself, in other words, a small target, and Clark has struggled to lay a glove on him. In the Oct. 14 debate, a panel member explored the idea of Key as a Nowhere Man, the candidate having admitted in an interview that while he was a commerce student at the University of Canterbury, he'd had no strong feelings about the controversial 1981 South African rugby union tour of New Zealand. A radical in her student days, Clark would have enjoyed her opponent's discomfort. But it's hard to believe that voters would seek to punish Key for a bout of indifference nearly 30 years ago.
Power and Passion
If key lacks intensity, that probably wouldn't bother many New Zealanders. While they take their politics seriously here — voter turnout in general elections has averaged nearly 90% since 1960, up there with the highest rates in the world among countries where voting isn't compulsory — they're also politically phlegmatic, saving their strongest emotions for more important matters, like rugby.
On a Friday afternoon at Key's alma mater, psychology student Michael Hempseed is rushing off to his part-time supermarket job, while elsewhere on campus a large portion of the student body has begun a raucous, migratory end-of-semester party. The days of universities as hotbeds of political dissent are over — in New Zealand, at least. Generally speaking, the main concerns of today's students are drinking and study — in that order, says Hempseed: "It feels like we're missing out on something." The 23-year-old will be voting Labour for two reasons. One, the economy will need special care and Labour is more experienced. And two, the downturn will create a new batch of unemployed who'll need looking after. "There are a lot of people on benefits who really should be working," Hempseed says. "But there'll be a lot of others who'll need the safety net and I feel that would be at some risk under National."
And if Key's Springbok tour comments were a sign of political naïvety, then that's all right too, says Frank Williams, who owns an agricultural contracting and cartage business in Cambridge in the Waikato region of the North Island. "Helen Clark is a fantastic politician. You can never take that away from her," says Williams. "She's very good at the political game. But maybe we've had enough of that." Key's learning fast, though — or perhaps his memory's good. Asked in the debate what it meant to be rich, Clark waffled, while Key sounded genuine talking about not having to live in fear of the next bill. His comments on welfare have stamped him as a compassionate conservative with a pragmatic streak: "I think you judge a country by the way you look after the sick and vulnerable, but also by how many sick and vulnerable people you create, and we have to get that balance right."
The balance is right as it is, says Anne Dickson, a Maori single mother of five in South Auckland. "He's too hard," she says of Key. "Some of us are struggling. Some of us haven't got any skills." Through a government Family Assistance package, Dickson, 26, gets the rent paid on a three-bedroom house and $NZ350 a week in the hand. The money tends to run out by Mondays, two days before she's paid again. But she makes do by cooking stews that can be stretched over a couple of nights. She's grateful for what she gets: "Helen," Dickson says, "I give her 100%."
On the other side of Auckland, Detective Sergeant James Watson has been won over by Key. In a year in which violent crime has risen by 12%, the would-be P.M. has played the tough guy to good effect, winning broad public approval for proposals including boot camp for young offenders and the scrapping of parole for hard-core criminals. "I'm not having, on my watch, people on the streets who've committed heinous crimes," Key told a national television audience. He's also made familiar right-of-center noises on education, foreshadowing national standards for literacy and numeracy, and plain-speaking school reports. "I think it's time for a change," says Watson, 18 years a cop, "and I know some of my colleagues are hanging out for one."
Clark, meanwhile, is struggling to seduce voters with lofty talk on combating climate change. The notion that the planet is on the brink of catastrophe from this amorphous force is a hard sell in New Zealand, where water is abundant and lush pastoral land rolls on forever. Clark wants New Zealand, which produces 0.4% of the world's carbon emissions, to set the pace on emissions cuts, just as it was the first country to grant women the vote (1893) and the first Western-allied nation to legislate itself into nuclear-free status (1987). "New Zealand has got to be part of solving serious problems," Clark said on Oct. 14, "not just sitting on the sidelines." Most of the provisions of her government's Climate Change Response (Emissions Trading) Amendment Act came into force in September. While New Zealanders want their country to be a solid global citizen, the idea of compromising the economy at a time like this in order to chip in on climate change has many of them stumped. "We're tiny, and here we are trying to lead the world," says agricultural business owner Williams. "What are we trying to prove?"
The "It's Time" Factor
The brewers arms in the Christchurch suburb of Merivale attracts a range of patrons, from high-fliers to battlers and everyone in between. In the evenings, the genial publican Wayne Williams likes to move among them, to hear their stories and their gripes. "My gut feeling is we're going to get a change of government," he says. Williams hopes his feeling is right. He respects Clark — he once watched her in a meeting "cut through the bulls... in no time flat" — and voted Labour in 2005. "But not this time," he says. "The place needs an overhaul. They're turning the place into a nanny state. The idea bank is drying up."
Some 200 kilometres to the north, in a roadside stall off State Highway 1, Adrianne Rochford contemplates the election while selling crayfish and mussels to passing tourists. "It's a tricky one," says Rochford, who's voted Labour most of her life. Yes, she's heard praise for Key and wouldn't mind seeing him in the Beehive. But she adds: "Who's it going to help?" New Zealanders would have a variety of answers to that question. But in many cases, it's not help exactly that they want. More than anything, come Nov. 8, they're looking for something new.
- Daniel Williams / Christchurch