Wellington - New Zealand's coming general election, in which Labour Party Prime Minister Helen Clark 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 they will go to the polls, but already dirt is flying in all directions and this in a country where politics has traditionally been a reasonably civilized business.
Charges of corruption are flying, a complaint has been laid with the Serious Fraud Office and a millionaire donor to Foreign Minister Winston Peters' New Zealand First party is threatening to go to the police because he does not know where his money went.
Health Minister David Cunliffe complained to police Thursday that his electorate office had been burgled and computer equipment with confidential material stolen.
The leader of the main opposition party, 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 National 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 an overall 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 Peters, founder of the nationalist New Zealand First party in 1993 and at 62 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 criticising him amid a welter of reports that his party has received money from millionaires over the years that has not been declared as required.
The charges are critical because Peters is a maverick who made his reputation railing against secret donations to political parties by big business organisations in return for favourable treatment.
He has consistently denied soliciting political donations despite claims by millionaire Sir Robert Jones that he 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 and Peters' arch-enemy in the House of Representatives, Rodney Hide, who leads the free market ACT Party, has initiated an inquiry by parliament's powerful privileges committee into a donation of 100,000 New Zealand dollars (72,000 US dollars) by another millionaire.
Peters has refused to answer questions about the donations, accused newspapers of joining with big business to smear him and produced a volley of accusations of corruption against other people.
His strategy, according to veteran political commentator Colin James, is "When you are in a hole, dig faster and heave dirt around. The idea is to cover so much outside the hole with dirt the casual observer might lose sight of the hole. You might then be able at some future point to climb out unnoticed."
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.
