Rhapsody in blue

November 15, 2008
Nick Smith maintained his hold on the Nelson electorate last weekend, and on the hearts and minds of many Nelsonians. But could he really be MP for life if he so chose? Geoff Collett reports. -------------------- Last Saturday, as the votes poured in, the National Party's chairman for the Nelson electorate asked its MP if he had his concession speech ready. Just in case.
Actually, the MP didn't, and really, the chairman, Russell Wilson, was only kidding; keeping Nick Smith on his toes, he says. After all, he knew, everyone knew, that Nick Smith was only going to be making victory speeches that night, just as he had every election night since 1990.
Because love him - and lots of Nelson people seem to; or hate him - and there are plenty of those too - it is hard to deny that Smith has all but surgically attached himself to the local consciousness. As one of his fans and part-time office staff, Sheila Scott, puts it, you don't really need the "MP" bit when you talk about MP Nick Smith to another Nelsonian. Everybody knows.
His admirers rate him the country's best electorate MP. His detractors admit, even if grudgingly, that he knows how to work the place better than most.
"He's extraordinarily hard-working and he knows that in order to be elected, you have to actually be active in your community. He will have an opinion on everything. If he does anything, he's smart enough to know that people need to know you've done it." That's from Mike Ward, the stoutest of the Green Party's stalwarts in Nelson, lying far along the spectrum from Nick Smith's rather fogeyish conservatism.
"I don't doubt that he's a pretty hard-working MP. He certainly appears to be hard-working. He hardly ever misses a photo opportunity to get himself acknowledged, " says Peter Olorenshaw, a leading opponent of one of Smith's pet campaigns, to build the southern link road.
Janice Gill, the campaign manager for Labour's most recent bid for the electorate says: "I hear that he's a hard worker, " but adds a barb: "That's just what he's paid to be . . . He's raised name prominence to an artform."
Roger Ledingham, a teacher and chairman of the Saxton Field Sports Stadium Society (Smith is his deputy on the trust; the two previously crossed swords over education politics): "I'm one of the worst cynics in the world and . . . I have heard nothing but good about him."
And Nick Smith himself? While there's long been a touch of the aw- shucks modesty to his public comments on his long-term success, he drops a hint of how he has come to regard his role: "The Winston Peters and Rodney Hides have a reputation for going after scandals . . . equally so, people come to me with things that go wrong in Nelson, because I have a reputation for doing something about it. And that actually helps me."
Sitting in his Fortress National - the complex of converted church buildings which is now both National Party HQ and his home, strategically located midway between the electorate's main population bases - and rattling through some of the community issues he has "immersed" himself in these past 20-odd years, he offers a reminder of how deeply he has burrowed his way into the place, whether through getting involved in bread-and-butter stuff like the Rocks Rd fishing platform or a new high school gym; heavyweight local campaigns like the Stoke bypass (aka Whakatu Drive) or building new schools; or nationally significant things like the creation of Kahurangi National Park. Smith can claim to have been there for them all, and much more.
"I'm an active member of Parliament, no question of that. The job satisfaction comes from what you can achieve both for a community and for individuals."
He has no shame in relentlessly working the parish pump. He has made himself a permanent fixture of Nelson's fleamarket, cannily and long ago recognising its value as a base for his sign-written caravan to advertise his existence and meet constituents. His campaign manager in 2005 and 2008, Bill Dahlberg, says one of Smith's idiosyncracies is his insistence each day that he must always have his copy of The Nelson Mail, preferably by 2.30pm, so he can brief himself on what's happening about town. Top of the most recent edition of his "10 good reasons to vote Nick 4 Nelson" pamphlet (his seasonal and unashamed pre-election self- promotion) was the Early Settlers Memorial Wall on Wakefield Quay, "one of dozens of Nelson projects that Nick has helped make happen".
Janice Gill, for one, is unimpressed: "What's that got to do with jobs? Health? Education? Incomes? . . . It's smart and clever politics, but smart and clever politics of the sort that give politics a bad name."
She is similarly unimpressed with how, after a Labour minister, Rick Barker, presented a cheque for the Saxton Field development, Smith got himself into a publicity photo with the cheque but minus Labour's man. Arrogance, she says. She uses the word a bit.
Labour is clearly determined to break down the shiny, friendly version of Nick Smith, the one who has ingratiated himself so widely and deeply in Nelson. "I don't admire his personality in any way. I think he's intemperate. I think he has a great deal of anger, " Gill says.
She insists Labour supporters don't sit around obsessing about the man, but clearly at least part of the tactic is going to be to put paid to any thoughts of impregnability about his connections with Nelson, to play up the deeper philosophical flaws they see in his politics.
"He said it himself at a public meeting (during the just-completed campaign) . . . 'there's a small amount of truth in most things'. I sat there. I think I clapped my hands together. I thought, that's exactly how he operates, how he gets his headlines, " Gill says.
The party thinks it has its chance, now that it finally has a candidate in Maryan Street who is prepared to come back and fight him for a second time, who will maintain a presence here in the meantime, and what's more has a parliamentary presence (see side story).
Then again, Mike Ward - who's fought as many elections in Nelson as anyone, and who knows from his own supporters just how intensely Smith's detractors dislike the man - would take some convincing. "He would be very hard to beat. If I was to be serious about picking up a seat, this would not be the one I would choose. It doesn't matter what his party does, his support is personal."
It probably doesn't get much more personal than Judy Ashton's. She found herself centre-stage in what has surely been Smith's principal cause celebre these past three years, the tragedy - and then scandal - over the death of her daughter, Debbie, in a road crash on the notorious switchbacks on Paton Rd between Richmond and Hope.
In the wake of the crash, and without Ashton's urging, Smith launched himself into a community petition demanding the Tasman District Council do something about the stretch of road, a popular and treacherous car-racing spot for idiots of the sort who killed Debbie Ashton.
But when the real story unfolded - how the killer turned out to be a paroled criminal whose past offending had been hidden from the courts when he appeared on other charges shortly before the fatal crash, because he was in the police witness protection programme - Judy Ashton knew she needed help. "I just thought, Nick. He's the person. I knew he'd stood up for other people in the past when they've had problems."
She had seen the MP in action but didn't know him. She is a National sympathiser, but "if I had been a left- wing extremist and gone to him I am sure I would have got just the same commitment from him". He leapt into the fray, organising meetings, agitating, threatening to break suppression orders under parliamentary privilege to get the hidden facts out.
Eventually, the full, gory details were released, and Nick Smith could claim another wrong righted, another "reason to vote for Nick4Nelson" at election time (No 7 in his leaflet: "Nick fights for justice").
The Ashton case gives rise to the most tempting, and obvious, criticism to throw at him - that the hard-luck stories he takes on are as much about grandstanding as they are about resolving individuals' traumas.
"I don't think he's used our situation as a political card, " says Ashton. "He asked if we would do a radio ad for him (during the election campaign) and I was more than willing. He has done so much for us . . . it's just my way of appreciation for what he did for us . . . And if it got him some votes, so be it. We need Nick in Nelson."
Not that things always end up the way Smith may hope. He's suffered some spectacular pratfalls in his time, along with the hits, such as his attack on Nelson lawyer John Levenbach, back in 2000, over Levenbach's apparently heavy-handed approach to chasing up a debt owed by a client, which unravelled when the client's background was scrutinised (but not by Smith).
A couple of years later came his almost-unprecedented conviction for contempt of court, for releasing suppressed information about a child custody case being fought in the Family Court.
There have been various others, including a defamation case he is defending over his criticism of a timber-treatment product (the $16 million writ is now subject to settlement negotiations).
"We constantly joke, 'Nick, don't get arrested again', " says electorate chairman Wilson. More seriously, Wilson says the MP does take advice, and listens to it, before deciding whether to launch into a new cause. It always boils down to natural justice, Wilson says.
Bill Dahlberg goes for the sporting metaphor: "Most of us have a few losses while we go for the Olympic ideal . . . With Nick, I appreciate his shortfalls, but his pluses well and truly outweigh them."
Even the misses can be hits. Smith certainly gained brownie points from his scrape with the Family Court; he recounts campaigning at Enza recently and encountering workers who knew the family, knew the story of what had gone on, and decided that Nick Smith had done the right thing in publicising the case, despite what the solicitor-general and courts had found. He had that smoko room stitched up.
Smith himself is unapologetic about turning his now well-oiled publicity machine on when he thinks it is time to ramp up his campaigns. He rationalises it with an argument about the role of the politician in helping to close the loop when there is a failing between the intention and the application of the law; of how "politics is not an academic exercise, it's about real people, their real lives, and sometimes it involves real tragedies in which the system needs to be flexible and responsive to".
Less nobly, he concedes that, "some people would say that I'm hyperactive . . . I get accused of grandstanding. What they don't know are the 100 cases that are never in the newspapers, and . . . that over the last four elections, including the last, my percentage of the vote has increased." Surely that has been the key to his long-term strategy, to ingratiate himself as widely and deeply as possible around the place. His office is a de facto citizen's advice bureau and community centre (its reputation for efficiency and contact-building is, by all accounts, formidable).
He prefers to talk of his strategy in terms of "hard work . . . hard work being passionate about Nelson" (from the leaflet, reason No 4 to vote Nick4Nelson: "Nick works his butt off").
He claims to be "deeply immersed in the Nelson psyche". He has far-reaching networks and has learned that in a close community like Nelson, the real gold comes not from getting his name in the paper but from personal interaction with individuals, doing things for them. "If somebody comes to you with a big problem and you solve it for them, they become friends for life and they become incredibly loyal."
Will this term - the one where, according to the Labour version, a one-term National-led government learns the hard lesson about getting what it hoped for - pose any particularly sticky challenges for Smith? If he gets his coveted cabinet position back in a John Key ministry, will he be able to work the place so assiduously? He reckons yes.
Locally, he predicts that the southern link debate will prove the toughest one for him to fight.
The road's opponents reckon Smith and his allies are contemptuous of the impact the road will have on the Victory community; Maryan Street thinks the damage his stance will do to him there has already been signalled, in the strong Labour showing at the community's voting booths last weekend.
Smith is willing to acknowledge that: "I just accept that I'm going to take some hits on it." He gives an impressive spiel about how the greater good has to prevail and all the usual politician's stuff.
Peter Olorenshaw and Mike Ward, both firm southern link opponents, aren't so sure that it will hurt him as badly as he martyrishly makes out. "He's a conservative. It isn't difficult to line up the bulk of your community when you're a conservative, " says Ward.
Olorenshaw suspects that if Smith wins the southern link argument, it will do him more good than harm. "The sort of people who vote for him are people who want to drive everywhere and can't think of any other option."
As he is always quick to point out, Smith is a relatively young man in politics (at 43 the second- youngest on National's front bench, he says), so it would seem premature to discuss legacies, especially given that he insists he would never tempt fate by assuming that Nelson is his for keeps.
But sometimes, the temptation is irresistible. As he ponders all that he's promised voters that "Nick4Nelson" will turn his boundless energy to in the three years ahead, he says: "I want to make sure that I make some progress, and that when I retire and I'm an old man in this community, I'll look back and say, 'yeah, I did some useful things'."