Taking a Step to the Right?

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Hard knocks: "I like John Key's path in life," says James Watson, head of the Crime Control Unit for the north shore of Auckland. "I think the honesty and integrity are there. He's a bit untested, but I'm confident he’d go okay."

Photograph for TIME by Nigel Marple

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Peter Atkins is weary and a little miffed. As usual, he's been up since dawn, fishing for a living off the coast of Kaikoura, a town in the north-east corner of the South Island. Blast, it shouldn't be this cold in October. And seagulls keep pecking at the crate-loads of hoki stacked on the deck of his boat. He's also been let down by a helper who's scampered before the day's work is done. Which gets him started on how, as he sees it, the government favors certain types of people. "Basically, people who haven't got a lot," he says. "But I haven't got a lot either. I've got a big mortgage and I work really hard — 70 or 80 hours a week — and they take a helluva lot of tax from me. But I never seem to see much for it." At this moment, the chill wind feels like a dark foreboding for the nine-year prime ministership of Helen Clark.

With up to 2.9 million New Zealanders about to vote in the Nov. 8 national election, Clark's Labour government is in strife. Having trailed the John Key-led National Party by as much as 18 points during the campaign, it looks ripe for the kind of electoral execution to which all long-term governments are vulnerable — the kind where voters decide they're sick of the sight of you. Days out from polling, Clark's best hope rests in the vagaries of the country's Mixed Member Proportional voting system, which make it unlikely that either major party will form a government on its own. Wooing minor-party support when the pressure's on has been a Clark knack. On election night, however, if the numbers fall as badly for Labour as some pollsters are forecasting, her renowned negotiation skills will be worthless.

Should New Zealanders decide to discard their 58-year-old Prime Minister, they will do so largely without relish. Aiming to gauge the nation's mood by traveling the country to speak to men and women from all walks of life, TIME found that while many are fed up with her government, nearly all concede a grudging respect for Clark. "She hasn't dropped a pass," says Stuart Wright, a sheep and potato farmer in Sheffield, west of Christchurch. Like Wright, Ken Arthur, a winegrower in Blenheim at the top of the South Island, wants Labour ousted. But he respects the P.M. as a straight talker. In 2003, Clark declined to involve New Zealand in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. "I would have to say she did well there," says Arthur, who served for 30 years in the Royal New Zealand Air Force. "I didn't agree with her at the time. But history has shown she was right."

Big Sister
Other right-leaning voters acknowledge what they see as Clark's Thatcheresque toughness and command of detail. But for many, these traits don't compensate for a government they see as increasingly paternalistic. Something like public outrage erupted in early October over a draft plan requiring that low-pressure shower heads be installed in new homes over a specified size, a trifle in itself but part of a wider narrative broadcast by anti-Clark forces that New Zealand has become a nanny state. It's a perception strongest in rural areas, where many farmers feel suffocated by bureaucracy. Sometimes, their grievances sound more like longing for a bygone era, when farmhands weren't glued to their mobiles and trampers couldn't expect a payout for injuring themselves on private land. But it's also a case of where there's smoke there's fire: Clark could never be mistaken for a proponent of small government.

As a threat to her rule, the cry of "nanny state" may be more potent than the weakened state of the country's $NZ150 billion economy. Its slide predates the global financial meltdown, with Treasury announcing back on Aug. 5 that the country was in recession. It was around this time that inflation hit an 18-year high and petrol passed the $NZ2-a-litre barrier. Like all shrewd incumbents, Clark has tried to turn bad news to her advantage: "I have the experience, the judgment and the skill set which can carry our country through what is the worst international financial crisis for more than 70 years," she said in a televised debate with Key on Oct. 14. But many New Zealanders are buying National's line that the Clark government squandered the boom times by granting only a single round of tax cuts in nine years. Consequently, New Zealand's best and brightest are fleeing the country in droves (1 in 4 of its university graduates lives overseas) for places like Australia, where wages are one-third higher.

Because Key's background is in finance, he's taken on the air of a man for the times. Born in 1961, Key hadn't long started school when his father died from a heart attack. His immigrant mother raised him and his two sisters in a state house in Christchurch. Though money was tight, young John excelled at school and university, and in the 1990s made a fortune as a foreign-exchange trader. Recruited by National in 2001, he won the newly created Auckland seat of Helensville the following year. By the end of 2006, he was party leader. It's a story very different to that of Clark, who's spent her adult life in lecture theaters and the corridors of power. "I think he [Key] would be great for the country," says Auckland dentist Allen Baker, who calls himself a centrist and articulates a common view of Key's credentials: "He's been in the real world. He understands business. I think the country desperately needs him at the moment."

Key's borrowed from the playbook of many a successful challenger, aligning himself with the status quo where it suits, veering from it only on sure-fire perennials like getting tougher on criminals and providing more tax cuts. He's made himself, in other words, a small target, and Clark has struggled to lay a glove on him. In the Oct. 14 debate, a panel member explored the idea of Key as a Nowhere Man, the candidate having admitted in an interview that while he was a commerce student at the University of Canterbury, he'd had no strong feelings about the controversial 1981 South African rugby union tour of New Zealand. A radical in her student days, Clark would have enjoyed her opponent's discomfort. But it's hard to believe that voters would seek to punish Key for a bout of indifference nearly 30 years ago.