New Zealand’s coming general election, in which Prime Minister Helen Clark of the Labour Party will seek to extend her nine years in power, looks set to be one of the dirtiest ever.
The campaign has yet to begin and voters don’t even know the date of the vote, but the political mood is already tense with allegations of corruption. A complaint has been filed with the Serious Fraud Office and a millionaire donor to the New Zealand First party is threatening to go to the police because he doesn’t know what his money was spent on.
Health Minister David Cunliffe complained to police yesterday that his electorate office had been burgled and computer equipment with confidential material stolen.
The National Party leader John Key said somebody had sifted through the rubbish outside his electorate office and three of his parliamentarians claimed their injudicious remarks at a cocktail party were secretly recorded by a Labour mole posing as a supporter trying to entrap them.
It looks as though Clark, a 27-year veteran of parliament, was right when she warned her team last month to don “hard hats” for the coming campaign.
Clark, 58, who has led minority coalitions after winning the last three elections, is set for the fight of her political life as she seeks another three years in office.
Opinion polls show Key, 46, a millionaire greenhorn politician who has led his conservative opposition party less than two years, is poised for a landslide victory in the poll, which must be held by mid-November.
He could even win a majority in the House of Representatives to have a one-party government for the first time since a proportional representation voting system introduced in 1996 made coalitions seemingly inevitable.
But that is not certain and that leaves Foreign Minister Winston Peters, founder of the New Zealand First and one of the wiliest politicians of his time, a central figure in the campaign.
Peters has emerged the kingmaker in two previous elections, choosing to go with the Nationals in 1996, as deputy prime minister and treasurer, and with Labour in 2005, when he promised Clark to support her government in exchange for the foreign minister’s portfolio.
Both Key and Clark are aware they could need Peters again. So they have held back from criticizing him amid a welter of reports that his party has received money from millionaires over the years without declaring it as required.
The charges are critical because Peters is a maverick who made his reputation by railing against secret donations to political parties by big business in return for favorable treatment.
He has consistently denied soliciting political donations despite claims by millionaire Sir Robert Jones that Peters cajoled him into giving a cheque made out to a trust run by Peters’ brother in 2005.
Jones is threatening to ask the police to investigate.
An embarrassed Clark, who would prefer to concentrate on fighting her political opponents in the run-up to the election instead of defending a minister who she took on out of need, not choice, says only that Peters has assured her he has done nothing illegal.
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