P.M.’s campaign picked up in third week

Press, 13 July 1984, Page 15

P.M.’s campaign picked up in third week

By

PATRICIA HERBERT

National’s leader, Sir Robert Muldoon, picked up stride in the third week of his election campaign after a long slow start. He had slogged through the first fortnight like an : old soldier fighting a battle, he might lose against an opponent he could not respect. It was an image he seemed to invite, offering himself to New Zealand as a veteran not only of politics but also of the trenches.

“I lost five years of my life during World War II and gained the best education I ever had,” he said in his opening address. He remembered the “best friend” who had been shot down over Britain and the obligation that that death “and all the others” placed on New Zealanders to maintain a strong commitment to A.N.Z.U.S.

It was a strangely personal argument which revealed less about the thinking behind the party’s defence policy than it did about the Prime Minister’s isolation.

He talked of the team he had backing him but the impression was of a man standing alone. This was confirmed in later speeches when he trailed off the subject to reminisce about childhood experiences. Having gambled on an early election, Sir Robert ran the campaign race under raised stakes. He had effectively put his future as

party leader on the line. He had to win. Yet he seemed to flirt with the possibility of de-, feat. “If I was in Opposition,” he told his Hastings audience then paused . . . “I was waiting for someone to say ‘You’re going to be.’ I hope I haven’t got you all cowed this early in the evening,” he said and chuckled. That was in the first week, before the opinion polls had piled up evidence that there was a mood for change in the nation which might be reflected in a heavy swing against the Government. However, he told a meeting at Timaru on Monday that he was “having a wonderful run” in the provincial electorates and that he had yet to visit one that National would lose. Then, later in the same day, he warned reporters travelling with him that predictions of a landslide to Labour were “certain to be wrong.” He said that he was picking a close finish and that the election would be won on seats, not voting percentages. He seemed to base his campaign on this analysis. It was an appeal to his traditional supporters to stick with him and it was aimed at the provinces. This was almost certainly the audience he had in mind when, using tactics commentators now described as “vintage Muldoon,” he hammered home the message that the Labour Party was dominated through the trade union movement by the Socialist Unity Party. “Are you going to be run from Trades Hall with a substantial input of Mos-cow-aligned Comms or are we going to do it the normal way and be run from Parliament under a National Government?” he asked a capacity crowd in the Oamaru Opera House. But his performance on the hustings was patchy. At his worst he was leaden and at his best he was often disappointing. The Hastings meeting has been presented as one of the few in the first two weeks of the campaign in which Sir Robert “hit form.” He was in high spirits, talked virtually off-the-cuff for more than an hour, and had the audience in stitches with a remarkably good impersonation of the Federation of

Labour president, Mr Jim Knox.

However, there were long, dull interludes when he read strings of statistics from the Reserve bank bulletin and from a confi-' dential report on the retail market. One member of the audience, “a Muldoon-follower for many years,” was not impressed. "Too lackadaisical,” he said at the end.

“He’s not really trying.” It seemed that if hunger for office had impelled Sir Robert when he barnstormed the country in 19741975 to topple the third Labour Government, he was this time fighting on a full stomach. Certainly he showed less appetite for the campaign battle than he had in the past and often allowed his meetings to run flat. One party official, knowing that Sir Robert worked better against hecklers, confessed after a particularly uninspiring performance that he had been tempted to sit at the back and interject. Word had it that he had been told to keep things low-key.

But before a capacity crowd in the Town Hall, Dunedin, on Tuesday, he really pulled the stops out, punching vigorously through his speech, and giving a bunch of noisy Labour supporters in the back rows as good as he got. “This is just like old times, isn’t it,” he said. He left the meeting elated and rated it his best.

Theories that age might have dulled his edge went out the window but he tended to attract older audiences and to identify himself with them. “The younger people” — those who did not remember keenly the rape of Hungary in 1956 — were a group apart.

He told voters that leadership was the key election issue and asked what “the other lot” could offer to compete with his track record, his grasp of the "realities” and — nameaing shamelessly — his arity with important heads of State.

Against this was the Labour alternative, Mr Lange, who had been in politics only six years, had no understanding of economics, and could not even control the Left wing in his own party. The choice, Sir Robert suggested, was simple. Then, for those who were unconvinced by that argument, he had another surely they should stick with the devil they knew? Attacks on Mr Lange’s credibility as a Prime Minister might have been ex-

pected. More surprising perhaps were the barbs that Sir Robert directed at other members of the Labour caucus.

It was an abrasive, streetfighting campaign; curiously negative from a leader up for his fourth consecutive, term in office. But he also focused attention on his Government’s management of the economy. It was a brave move because the controls he has imposed as Minister of Finance have attracted bitter criticism, because there is widespread scepticism about the success of his strategy, and because much of the achievement exists only on paper. He argued that he had nursed New Zealand through the recession and set it on the path to prosperity but he had to rely on forward projections to Erove his case and that left im needing an act of faith from the electorate.

Sir Robert’s most moving appeal in the campaign was that the country not toss aside the recovery that had been so hard won by throwing his party out of power. ■ He told the people of Oamaru that his plan to beat inflation was only halfexecuted. The rate had been brought down but, to be built in, it had to be kept low so that inflationary expectations were knocked out of the economy. “This is the critical part,” he said. “We must not have a Labour Government so that all that is lost. We must not have it.”

So, to a public which might have wanted relief or a new direction, he promised very little. There were some handouts but they were conspicuous only because they came in an undignified rush in the first few days after the snap election was called.

He had gone to the polls because he wanted a fresh mandate for his economic programme and he was not about to jeopardise it by letting too much money loose or to stop the free marketeers from sliding over to the New Zealand Party.

Neither did he back down from his combative style of leadership although the polls were showing that it was costing National vital support in the marginals. Instead, he put himself up "warts and all” and offered more of the same. For this Sir Robert deserves respect. He has often been described as a political gambler but the description short-changes him. He has a courage which is larger than the ability to take risks and he showed it on the campaign.