Election campaign opening shots to be fired today

Press, 2 November 1981, Page 1

Election campaign opening shots to be fired today

By

PHILLIP MELCHIOR,

NZPA chief political reporter

Wellington The final countdown to the General Election will start in Waikato this evening with the official campaign opening by the National Party.

When he goes on television to open his bid for a third term as Prime Minister, Mr Muldoon will be firing the opening shots in a campaign of which the prize is to govern New Zealand.

In an election which many pundits feel could be a watershed in New Zealand’s political history, senior politicians of. the National, Labour, and Social Credit parties will criss-cross the country on a campaign trail taking the party leaders from Kaitaia in the north to Invercargill in the south.

Mr Muldoon will launch his bid for powqr from Hamilton, the centre he has chosen to open his campaign in each of the last two elections he has contested as leader of the National Party. Mr Rowling will start Labour's drive to regain the government, after six years in Opposition, from Palmerston North, the starting point for his 1978 election hopes. Mr Beetham, the charismatic headman of the Social Credit League, will return to Hamilton on Wed,nesay evening to complete the staggered start. By the time the campaign is closed the day before polling day in four weeks time, the three leaders will have clocked up tens of thousands of kilometres by car and planes. They will have spoken to the party faithful and, perhaps, a smattering of the uncommitted at a total of 60 main meetings in cities and

towns throughout New Zealand.

They will have given dozens of speeches and performed a variety of functions, from official openings — which range from cheese factories to the Mangaweka road deviation — to simple, traditional, political gladhanding. The three leaders will themselves be backed up by their senior colleagues. Labour and National particularly will put senior frontbenchers on the road in a bid to swing the vital marginal electorates and hold on to what they have already.

The outcome of it all is anyone’s guess. Labour and National are putting supremely confident faces on their prospects and Social Credit, with no realistic prospect of winning a majority of the 92 seats in Parliament, is equally confident within its less wide-ranging ambitions.

The voters will decide whose confidence is well founded and whose misplaced on Saturday, November 28.

However, before that the parties will spend fortunes in trying to help them make up their minds. Labour, has estimated its all-in campaign costs at more ■ than ?2 million. National follows a strict policy of never revealing its costs, but they are unlikely to'be less than its rival’s.

Social Credit has raised about $1 million to help translate its consistent

opinion poll support of 20 per cent-plus into votes where they count.

The next four weeks are really only the last gasp of a process which has been going on with increasing intensity all year. The two aspirants to the Treasury benches released their detailed policies over the course of several months, rounding them off in recent days with glossy publications designed more for public appeal than for putting over the fine detail of policy planks. The National Party, with no manifesto this year, intends to fight the campaign almost exclusively on the basis of its growth strategy which started life as “think big” at the beginning of the year.

Each of the opening addresses will be beamed live on television throughout New Zealand.

Mr Muldoon will go from Hamilton to Taupo and Rotorua, before heading across Cook Strait to Rowling country in Nelson, and to Blenheim. He will end the week in his own stronghold of Auckland.

Mr Rowling will move from his Palmerston North opening to the marginal Kapiti seat before going on to Wellington and a big jump to Invercargill and Oamaru. Mr Beetham, with less time left to him after his Wednesday opening, will go north from Hamilton to Auckland, Thames, and Tauranga.