The (John) Key factor: grinners are winners

He’s a self-made mega-millionaire in a multi-roomed mansion, leading a country of battlers struggling against low wages and high unemployment, many living in damp, overcrowded homes.

His country’s economy is slipping and sliding further behind the self-imposed benchmark of Australia and with no real rescue plan. While Australia spent its way out of the recession his solution was a cycleway. It’s still unfinished.

As Minister for Tourism he oversees an industry that jostles for top place as exchange earner, yet spends his holidays in Hawaii.

He wasn’t involved in the defining event of his generation that split the nation over sport and race. Instead he spent much of his working life overseas in big money dealing, a business few understand and many distrust.

The angry indigenous minority traditionally backs his opponents. He doesn’t need their support yet he’s brought them into his ministry.

In any other country, particularly one with a proud history of iconoclasm, New Zealand’s Prime Minister John Key would be a one-term wonder, the butt of ridicule.

But in the election later this year the leader of the National Party, (the Kiwi version of Australia’s Liberals), is expected to stroll into a second three-year term, his mana (authority and influence) secure.

Labour has tried digging dirt and casting slurs, but nothing has stuck on Jolly John. He’s the man for all seasons who smiles his way through political winters, yet still finds the right tone to handle tragedy.

In 2008 he defeated Helen Clark, the feisty, no-nonsense competent but controversial PM for nine years. He succeeded not by trying to be tougher, but by being bland.

Key inherited a collapsing economy and volatile social issues. Labour, prodded by the Greens, had supported a bill to help diminish the national shame of child bashing, but opponents tagged it the Anti-Smacking Law.

Right-wing Christian groups who hated the agnostic and childless Clark saw this as interference in parenting. Huge opposition forced a referendum that collected almost 1.5 million signatures (87 per cent) against the law.

Had Clark remained in power and refused to budge the outrage would have been seismic. Key uttered a few smooth words, left the law in place and the electorate relaxed.

He then reintroduced British imperial honours long since ditched by Labour despite no apparent demand for knights and dames in a nation that claims it pioneered egalitarianism. Again the voters grinned.

Shortly after taking office and nursing a broken arm, Key was jostled by Maori protestors at a Treaty of Waitangi celebration. Clark had refused to attend earlier events after similar insulting behaviour, but Key laughed off the incident and continued making concessions to Maori.

These included happily allowing the Maori flag to be flown on public buildings. Had Clark promoted such a gesture she would have inflamed the lunar right. But who would dare oppose a winner, particularly one who slashed top-end income tax?

This huge concession to the rich at the height of the recession came with a GST rise to 15 per cent that brutally whacked workers. They were already facing lengthening dole queues and new laws allowing instant dismissal in their first three months, with no recourse.

Such blatant attacks on the blue-collar classes by a man with an estimated $50 million should have roused the masses. Yet this and other factors, like an expose of politicians rorting their allowances, failed to fuel hate. Again the Key factor. He seems such a relaxed, friendly, self-deprecating guileless guy he’s impossible to dislike. Or distrust.

He remained unfazed when tens of thousands took to the streets to oppose mining on conservation land. The idea came from a colleague. Key flicked the issue away and talked instead about his vasectomy, successfully diverting public attention.

His success can’t just be put down to a lazy opposition led by 30-year veteran Phil Goff, 57, a professional politician with a long, though unspectacular record in government.

Key, 49, isn’t a career politician and that’s to his advantage. He only entered Parliament in 2002 and wears no albatrosses. Although backed by conservatives he’s no slave to Tory ideology and the old conflicts over issues like race seem absent from his portfolio. He defines himself as a centrist.

Despite his great wealth Key was brought up in a State home by his Austrian-Jewish mother after the death of his English immigrant father. Key doesn’t play on his poor childhood, but instead projects a friendly guy-next-door persona, a bloke who wouldn’t burn the snags at a neighbourly barbecue.

He’d have a beer but wouldn’t get drunk. He’d tell mildly funny stories about his teenage kids that would resonate with other parents. Confrontationists would get placated, and his childhood sweetheart and stay-at-home wife Bronagh would turn out to be small-town charming. So refreshing after Clark’s army of hairy-armpit feminists full of aggro, bashing society into their image.

During the Christchurch earthquake and last year’s Pike River mine disaster where 29 men lost their lives, Key handled the tragedies well, easily and naturally finding the right heartfelt tone.

All this makes politics across the Tasman as exciting as a flat Pavlova. Parliament is boisterous but lacks the grudges and savagery of Canberra. It hasn’t always been so - NZ politics in the past has been rough and brutal. Opposing South African rugby apartheid, US nuclear fleets and French terrorist bombings has given the nation a reputation for guts and principle.

Key says he’ll quit politics if defeated this year. This could be read as arrogance, but it’s really sending a clear message: Stay with me because what you see is what you get. Otherwise it will be back to Labour’s secret machine men and women manipulating their parliamentary puppets.

Clark was thrown out largely because voters got sick of social engineering. They’d had enough of PC correctness and expected the newcomer to return the country to its robust roots.

That hasn’t happened. Key has undone little of Labour’s work, but National’s fear of being labelled the nanny state has made him cautious on curing social ills, like being tough on drivers who drink, tackling the country’s poverty and the widening gap between rich and poor. On these issues he’s had a clear mandate but has failed to act.

There’s one wild card in this scenario of certainty - the Rugby World Cup in October. Should the All Blacks lose, NZ will slump into depression, then seek scapegoats. With the Mixed Member Proportional system favouring minor parties, some curious coalitions might result if the electorate puts a pox on all politicians.

Sceptics believe that if Key gets a second term the smile will turn to snarl. An electorate lulled to sleep would be easily ambushed by the rabid right, currently safely kennelled but ever ready to savage NZ’s state-owned enterprises and socialist structures. The Accident Compensation Corporation that provides no-fault cover to all is seen as a likely target, along with the State-owned Kiwibank.

Who’d believe such scaremongering? Even if he sold the family silver and kicked the kids into the street it must surely be for the best. John’s such a nice man.