Chris Carter’s slide into the political wilderness shifts the focus to Labour leader Phil Goff’s ability to be an election-winner. Goff has a stormy ride ahead

Someone should have seen it coming. Chris Carter’s implosion was absolutely predictable. His sense of grievance was evident from the moment he was fingered last June for travel and expenses excesses as a minister in Helen Clark’s last cabinet.

After all, former cabinet colleagues – including Phil Goff – who now brand his expense claims as “excessive”, had been silent witnesses when his ministerial travel was being approved by his beloved leader. His other expenses misdemeanors were minimal; and his subsequent travel with his partner Peter Kaiser was within parliamentary rules.

That Carter’s sense of grievance had turned to denial was obvious from his initial response to the wave of criticism generated by the expenses’ review: he was tired of “people trying to paint this image of these luxury-loving gay boys who are swanning around”.

That his denial turned to shock was evident from his runaway reaction to the media pack pursuing him for reaction to his leader’s decision to demote him, and his subsequent terse and belated apology “under intense pressure”.

Goff’s decisive action in whacking Carter publicly for his behavior and sending him home on stress leave may have won the leader kudos from the media, but it could only have compounded the pressure that was turning Carter into a ticking time bomb.

Labour’s bomb squad should have been on the alert when Carter subsequently took an unauthorized trip to China, paid for by the Chinese government. Carter barely pre-empted the inevitable post-trip crisis with his bungled attempt to dethrone Goff.

After the event, it is easy to write Carter’s actions off as the behavior of a disturbed individual seeking “death by cop” as my colleague Tim Watkin put it. But someone should have heard the suicide bomber coming – and put the political protection in place before the explosion.

That raises questions about the Labour’s political management.

Goff’s problems will not evaporate with Carter’s exile to the political wilderness – just as Labour’s general failure to gain political traction will not be cured by Carter’s simplistic solution: changing the leader.

Goff and the Labour Party have a rocky road to ride, and they are still searching for the route map. Goff was beginning to head in the right direction when Carter blew him off course.

The charmed life of John Key is going to get harder as the year progresses. The downside of the last budget will start registering in full from October with government-driven inflation hitting home, government “non-essential” public service pruning becoming more vigorous and obvious, and the Reserve Bank’s determination to roll-back its anti-recessionary stimulus and wind up interest rates biting harder.

The recovery in this country is fragile and slowing. The economy is more vulnerable to external pressures.

Goff saw the opportunity for attack. The government was retreating on its step-change mining plan, scrabbling to secure its big business base with an anecdotally-based plan for further employment law changes, and indulging in some slippery stuff to avoid the charge that it was presiding over an increase in the wage gap between New Zealand and Australia, rather than closing it.

But while Goff was honing the message, the trade unions took the bait dangled by Key’s leaked plan to announce an expansion of 90 day probation to cover all new employment, new checks on workers’ sick-leave, and new constraints on union access to workers on site.

Labour party president Andrew Little, wearing his other hat as national secretary of the country’s largest private sector union, called on his EPMU troops to join a protest outside the National’s party conference at the Sky City Convention Centre.

When a direct action group tried to take the protest inside the conference by gate-crashing the Sky City Hotel entrance, Little was reduced to condoning their aggressive move.

He told me it was not his place to approve or disapprove of the gate-crashers’ punch-up. It was, he suggests, the understandable passion of people roused by fear of what Labour activists call Key’s “drastic attack on workers’ rights”.

Goff was licked into line when he appeared to deviate from party policy by putting a lower priority on opposing the government plan to allow the fourth week of workers holidays to be traded for cash than on other aspects of Key’s employment reform programme.

The Council of Trade Unions has now held its first “council of war”. CTU president Helen Kelly is promising that this month will be the “start of a long campaign to promote Fairness at Work in the face of a government which is tilting the balance in favour of employers – particularly bad employers.”

Little’s EPMU is calling for “a mass mobilization of union members and workers to defeat this assault from National".

He told me in an interview last week that the campaign will be taken directly to individual employers. They will be asked for their position on National’s plan and may be confronting the prospect of industrial action if they give the wrong response.

An increase in militant union action between now and the election will be grist to National’s mill. Goff must know what the direct action faction within a “mass mobilization” can do to Labour’s prospects of winning back the vital, centre New Zealand vote. His rough ride to the next election is far from over.