POWER OF ONE

It’s beginning to look suspiciously as though New Zealanders really yearn for a sort of benign dictatorship.

Once again, we’ve gone for a voluntary one-party state – having soundly thrashed one of the minor parties we once elected for accountability and given the other one a hell of a fright.

Only this country could take MMP and create with it a series of Lee Kuan Yews and Kemal Ataturks – a sequence of leaders with increasing dominance, who had power in direct proportion not to the respect and authority they engendered but to how much we liked them.

There were nine years of Helen Clark’s calm authority, then the era of the uber-affable John Key, which – just four years ago – felt incapable of being ended, even