Power Simon: General Debate 
Power Simon: General Debate 
[Volume:664;Page:12314] 
Hon SIMON POWER (Minister of Justice) 
: 
 I move  
That the House take note of miscellaneous business 
. On 1 July this year victims of crime in New Zealand will be better off as a result of the work that this John Key - led Government has done. But I want to turn to another large news item in recent days. The recent leadership coup in the Australian Labor Party has led me to reflect on the possibility of change in the leadership of the New Zealand Labour Party. There are a couple of lessons to be learnt from the Australian experience. The first is that the polls cannot be ignored. The latest TV3 poll showed not only that the current Leader of the Opposition is polling one-tenth of the support that New Zealand has for our Prime Minister John Key but also more important that Mr Goff is within 0.2 percent of his main rival the former leader of the Labour Party the Rt Hon Helen Clark who now resides in New York. This is the same former leader who apparently still advises members of the Labour Party caucus by text from New York. I ask whether it is the same advice that Brian Edwards gave to Chris Carter to “keep his head down until after the 2011 election when he will almost certainly be answerable to a different and more reasonable leader of the Labour Party.” 
As we saw with the change in leadership from Geoffrey Palmer to Mike Moore in 1990 and the attempt to roll Helen Clark in 1996 Labour has a history of changing leaders in an attempt to lessen the damage at the last moment. After all when David Lange talked of poll-driven fruit cakes he was talking about his own Labour colleagues. 
Mr Goff is not immune to poll-driven advice. He appears to have adopted a new purposeful stride as he gets around New Zealand and he now sports a fixed toothy smile whenever he is yelling into the nation’s living rooms on television at 6 o’clock each night. But if his polling does not improve by the end of the year then we will see a leadership spill to stem the bleeding. It is the kind of ambitious and aspirational race we have come to expect from the Labour Party. 
But the second lesson from the recent Australian experience and this is the key point is that the people to watch are not the leadership aspirants because there are not too many of those left over there but the power brokers. The power brokers are the people to watch in Labour Party politics. It was a great relief to be enjoying this trans-Tasman analogy because I have to say I was struggling to come up with any leadership aspirants in the Labour Party caucus but the potential game changes I look to amongst members opposite—and he has his head down; he is a bit bashful but he knows what I am going to say—are people like Trevor Mallard. He is a power broker in the Labour Party and in recent days he has made some dangerously thoughtful contributions in the House regarding State-owned enterprises and on his blog about commerce matters. 
I also look to people like Charles Chauvel who in the wake of the credit card scandal will be grateful he was not elevated to the executive as he thought he should be when he put his press release out claiming he had been under the last Government. I look to Grant Robertson the leader of the 2008 intake. I say to him: “Take it from me Mr Robertson it will get you nowhere.” The leader of the 2008 intake recently revealed this: “It’s funny when you’re with Phil and out in public with Phil people do warm to him … but the way in which the media portrayal of him is happening … I don’t think it’s giving him a lift in the polls.” That was very insightful advice from Mr Robertson. 
But it is the quiet ones we have to watch. Ross Robertson and George Hawkins are still fighting the good fight. The only way the Labour Party will get the seats back from them is to prise them out of their cold dead hands because those two are not letting go come hell or high water. Of course the real players as I said are the dangerous ones. Ashraf Choudhary—one never knows! There is a big bloc there. But then there are those who have a foot in each camp on the generational debate like Moana Mackey or Darren Hughes who has one foot with Annette King and Phil Goff and the other just edging out to see who is next. So the final lesson in all of this for Mr Phil Goff from the Australian experience is “Keep an eye on the redhead”.