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that seems to be working: the attention on the campaign so far makes the Wellington Sevens seem popular.

There is no party vote in a byelection, of course, but that hasn’t stopped such byelection tactics attracting similar criticisms to tactical postures at general elections. Electoral rort! Dirty deal! Rotten borough! In the most recent example, condemnations are raining on the decision by the Green Party not to stand a candidate in Ohariu, in an attempt to help Labour candidate Greg O’Connor unseat the entire caucus of the United Future party, Peter Dunne. TV3’s irrepressible political editor Patrick Gower went so far as to decry “the dirtiest electorate deal in New Zealand political history”.

But on the cleanliness scale is it really much more than a grass stain? Grubbier than plotting to exploit the “coat-tails” rule that exempts parties who win a constituency from the 5 per cent threshold? Grubbier than cryptically endorsing another party’s candidate? Bill English needn’t respond to the Green gambit in Ohariu by reprising the archetypal MMP dirty deal of Wellington Central 1996, when Jim Bolger threw his own candidate, Mark Thomas, under the bus at the 11th hour to clear the way for Act’s Richard Prebble — he can just amplify the nudges and winks.

Arguably, at least, to abandon putting up a candidate altogether is a whole lot cleaner than the cup-of-tea pantomimes of yore. After the teapot tapes debacle of 2011, John Key quit the cafe dates in favour of a more straightforward indication of continued lifesupport for the Act party in Epsom. He nevertheless persisted with deploying a candidate, for whom victory is achieved by snuggling into the jaws of defeat. And Paul Goldsmith is undeniably a master of this craft, gliding through the Epsom electorate like the pushmi-pullyu of Dr Doolittle, urging with one head “Vote for us”, while whispering from the other, “Just not for me”. But the Greens do it, too, in pretty much every seat they contest.

Labour ties itself in knots, meanwhile, by scrambling for some moral high ground, to sniff that they’re above such shenanigans, but in the “electoral accommodation” of Ohariu and to a lesser extent the felling of Willow-Jean Prime in Northland, they’re at it, too. And why wouldn’t they be? If anything they’re daft for adopting a just-not-cricket stance: notwithstanding any danger that voters punish parties they regard as adopting underarm-bowl-level gamesmanship, you play, within the rules, to win. Surely.

While it’s a bore to hear party leaders fail to treat voters as grown-ups by doing something as radical as saying what they mean — as in Green co-leader James Shaw’s refusal to explicitly say that, yes, he’d encourage Green supporters in