That is what Matt McCarten is suggesting as price for ensuring Winston's support after the election. But will Labour want Winston's support. If Glenn has donated to NZ First then Peters will be toxic waste. Maybe McCarten had not caught up on the latest when he wrote his article.
We do agree with some of McCarten's analysis however....
It's not a good period for the Labour backbenchers, with half of them no doubt brushing up their CVs so they can get a real job after election day.
The polls are disastrous for Labour, no matter how you try to spin it. National consistently wins more than 50 per cent in the polls while Labour sits in the low 30s. If we accept the conventional wisdom, Helen Clark should be surrendering the Beehive to John Key now and save us the bother of an election.
Clark's claim that the polls aren't accurate is dubious at best. She has some legitimacy when she points out that they tend to under-count young people and the less well off, who are more likely to be her supporters. Only people with landlines are polled, which excludes many young and poor people. Anecdotal evidence suggests that about one in three people on the electoral roll does not have a landline.
But even so, this would probably make a difference of less than 5 per cent. With polls showing up to 25 points between the two big parties, that won't be much comfort to her parliamentary colleagues.
