Odds against Mallard

Long-serving Labour MP Trevor Mallard, one of Wellington’s bestknown political figures, won’t run for his Hutt South seat again.

He will instead take a position on Labour’s list - and says he hopes to be Parliament’s Speaker if the party forms a government.

On current polling, that is wishful thinking, as it has been for the past eight years.

There is some thin precedent for a government appointing an Opposition MP to the role - Labour’s Peter Tapsell held it from 1993 to 1996. But that required an unusually tight election result. The current Government, with its long list of underemployed backbenchers, is unlikely to elevate Mallard.

And that is a shame, because in his short stints deputising for current Speaker David Carter, Mallard has already done enough to hint that he would make a good fist of the job.

He has a veteran’s knowledge of Parliament’s arcane rules and standing orders. He also has a delinquent’s knowledge of the same: his own record in the House includes plenty of ejections, warnings, and worse. (He famously punched fellow MP Tau Henare in the lobby.)

Yet the poacher-turnedgamekeeper model can work for politicians. Mallard knows all the tricks, so he might effectively gazump others trying to use them.

Just as importantly, he seems to have a genuine desire to hold the role. Carter took on the role reluctantly, and has too often failed to disguise the fact.

His predecessor, Lockwood Smith, was a better model: comfortable in the pomp of the job, tough on waffling ministers, and unusually open about releasing information on politicians’ spending.

Perhaps Mallard could revive some of that spirit.

Still, if Labour does not win, and Prime Minister John Key does not throw an unusually generous bone across the aisle, Mallard will not be the Speaker.

The same reasons that make him a decent candidate for Speaker mean he should look to the exit if it doesn’t come off: that he has been in Parliament, more or less continuously, since 1984; and that he is best-known as a political pit-bull, rather than a fresh face.

So it’s possible that Mallard’s decision is partly an act of selfpreservation too. It might be that