Linked in: Key playing golf with Barack Obama in Hawaii in January. Credit:AFP He's unabashed about ambition and success. He made an estimated $NZ40 million by age 40 as a currency trader at a Wall Street investment bank. He was PM at 47. When Good Weekend accompanies Key on a recent campaign visit to the Wellington Institute of Technology, a young polytechnic graduate in the building trade tells Key he's weighing up job offers. "I'm taking the best offer, obviously," says Josh. "I'm always chasing the money." Key approves, loudly: "That's my boy!" After two terms in power, Key's National Party approaches the September 20 election with a lead of two to one over the opposition Labour Party. How can a wealthy investment banker be so popular? "Because of my background; my father died when I was very young, my mother brought us up with no money in a government-owned house," he says. "New Zealanders are kind-hearted people, and if you make money under your own steam they actually respect that." When Key was about 10, he announced: "I'm going to learn to play golf." He knew that businessmen had golf lunches. But his widowed mother, Ruth, who worked as a night porter to support her three children, was not impressed by the expensive choice of hobby. A Jewish refugee from Hitler's occupied Austria, she struggled for money and constantly urged her son: "I expect you to work your way up in the world." The schoolboy took her advice, declaring his goal to become prime minister. And the golf skills? The PM and his chief of staff recently played against Barack Obama and one of his aides during a visit to Washington. "The beautiful thing is," Key has said, "we kicked their arse." Like Obama, Key regularly holidays in Hawaii, where he owns a house, and the pair play golf when their holidays align.

Key player: New Zealand's prime minister, John Key. Credit:Platon/trunkarchive.com/Snapper He may be wealthy, but he appreciates struggle. He recalls one night, when his mother served chicken for dinner, that he complained that they had no salt to put on it. His mother burst into tears at the table. "It was the only time I saw her cry," he told his biographer, John Roughan. "You learnt not to ask for things, because why would you upset her? Even as a child, you soon learnt she was doing her damnedest." His straitened family circumstances give him a political credential for his tightening of the welfare system. His experience in finance gives him some credibility in economics. The real economic manager in the Key government, however, is his deputy, Finance Minister Bill English. As veteran political journalist Colin James tells me: "English is the strategic thinker. Key is the presenter, though sometimes he intervenes and backs big policy." Or, as English once put it: "I'm a stayer, he's a sprinter. I grind away, John just bounces from one cloud to another." Now the country is entering a boom. Business sentiment is at a 20-year high, as is consumer confidence. Currency traders speculate on whether the Kiwi dollar will reach parity with the Australian. That last happened 40 years ago, in the era when governments set exchange rates. The so-called brain drain of Kiwis abandoning their country to pursue better opportunities in Australia has long been a source of deep national unease. Key tried to capitalise on it. When he first ran for the prime ministership in 2008, he filmed a TV campaign ad standing in Wellington's Westpac stadium, capacity 34,000: "The equivalent of this entire stadium and more leaves every year." He promised to turn it around under the slogan: "Wave goodbye to higher taxes, not your loved ones." But the net outflow didn't slow. It accelerated.

The opposition took up the issue as a Key failure. Three years on, the then Labour leader David Shearer filmed his own campaign ad in the same stadium, pointing out that the number of citizens departing each year would overflow the park. But in the last few months, the brain drain has slowed to a trickle. Australia's economy has eased just as New Zealand's has accelerated and the maturing of the mining boom has put many Kiwis out of work. "Many are coming home," Key explains. "Generally speaking, I'm a happy, upbeat, definitely a glass-half-full kind of guy. And I think that's actually helped the national psyche a bit." But hold on. The "Saudi Arabia" of milk has been enjoying a dairy boom. Exports have surged from $NZ2 billion a year in 1990 to about $NZ16 billion this year. They account for a third of all NZ's exports. Then there's construction. A mighty project to rebuild much of quake-racked Christchurch is underway. The cost is projected to be $NZ40 billion, equivalent to 20 per cent of the national GDP, over a few years. Key benefits politically from this economic revival but does he deserve credit? "Over the last six years," he says, "everything from controlling our expenditure to lifting the overall productivity and efficiency of the economy has clearly helped in laying the foundation for NZ to grow."

Bill English argues that central to the "structural lift in confidence" New Zealand has enjoyed is the more independent and less welfare-dependent work ethic the government has fostered. Asked whether their country was "on the right track", two-thirds of New Zealanders said "yes" in a May poll by UMR Research. The biggest hit to Key in the election campaign so far has been the publication of Nicky Hager's book Dirty Politics. The investigative journalist alleges Key's office had been supplying an aggressive conservative blogger, Cameron Slater, with privileged information to use against political enemies. According to opposition Labour leader David Cunliffe: "The government has constructed a systematic approach to smearing, undermining and carrying on in the most unministerial, undemocratic and unprincipled way." In one example, Justice Minister Judith Collins had given Slater's site, Whale Oil Beef Hooked, the name of a public servant whom she suspected of leaking. He was threatened with death after Whale Oil's denunciations. In another, NZ's Security Intelligence Service had given Whale Oil privileged access to information. The SIS confirmed publicly that it had informed the PM before giving the information to Whale Oil. But the intelligence agency later clarified that it had briefed Key's office, not the PM himself. The ombudsman supported this. And Key said he'd been having "a whale of a time" holidaying in Hawaii on the day in question. Key's opponents have long tried to fuel a perception that Key is a little slippery, smarmy, not entirely trustworthy, the sort of character people suspect would thrive in an investment bank. This affair appeared to strike at precisely this vulnerability. His popularity fell by 8.5 points in the poll that followed the revelations. But in late August he still enjoyed the approval of 65 per cent of voters; David Cunliffe held just 15. Dirty Politics may have cost Key's National Party government some votes, almost 5 points worth, yet it remained in a commanding lead with the support of half of all voters, exactly double Labour's share.

Key's is not a commanding presence or magnetic personality. But he does project an agreeable common sense. "He comes across as an average bloke in touch with people's thinking," explains Nigel Roberts, a professor of political science at Wellington's Victoria University. "In terms of weirdness," says Malcolm Turnbull, "all politicians are above zero. Key is as normal and grounded as John Howard was." Rather than ration his public exposure, he courts as much as he can get. "The media allocates a lot of people, energy and money to covering politics, and if the government and the prime minister of the day [aren't] engaged in that debate, then the void will be filled by somebody else," Key says. Nor does his office seek to control the media appearances of his ministers. He has leavened his unrelenting reasonableness by embracing some moments of potential personal embarrassment. They play well for the prime minister "because they look less like publicity stunts than publicity risks, which they are", writes John Roughan. He modelled a new uniform for staff at the 2011 Rugby World Cup and hammed it up, parading down a catwalk in front of the cameras. As a newly elected PM, he danced with a pair of beefy transvestites at Auckland's Big Gay Out festival. And he accepted the challenge of taking up a cricket bat to face an over from Shane Warne as a fundraiser for the Christchurch earthquake appeal, despite never having played cricket. Key arranged for coaching, and in the event managed to hit three boundaries from eight balls. But Warne, we can assume, was not at his most aggressively competitive. Says Roughan: "The more ordinary and even error-prone Key appears in these moments, the more it works as a counterpoint to his wealth and success."

Key's appeal is not because he has avoided taking unpopular measures. He is part-privatising state-owned assets, for instance, selling up to 49 per cent of three electricity companies, a coal-mining firm and Air New Zealand. And John Howard, over lunch with Key, advised against raising New Zealand's GST, having barely won re-election himself after promising to introduce it in Australia. But breaking a promise to the electorate, Key raised the rate from 12.5 per cent to 15 per cent in his first term. In Australia, most tax experts concur that Canberra needs to do the same to repair the country's tax base, but both main political parties in Australia are terrified of the idea. But Key held his public approval. In Key's version, he made sure it was "not unfair" on the lowest paid. All workers got a tax cut; the highest-paid got the biggest one. People earning less than $NZ14,500 enjoyed a cut from 12.5 per cent to 10. At the top, Key cut the rate from 38 per cent to 33. People on welfare got a 2.02 per cent increase in their payments to offset the increase in prices. But while the tax cuts were permanent, the welfare increase was temporary. This, axiomatically, increases inequality. But Key argues that taking into account the extra GST paid by wealthier people means the net effect is, at worst, "distributionally neutral." An important factor was that the country was in an economic downturn and trusted Key to turn it around. This opens up the area of Key's greatest vulnerability and biggest challenge. In opposition, he promised to tackle inequality and the "underclass". In 2007 he declared: "We are seeing a dangerous drift toward social and economic exclusion." And while his government has taken some steps to improve conditions for the lowest paid, such as increasing the minimum wage from $NZ12 an hour to $14.25, inequality in NZ has not narrowed. The boy who was raised in state-owned housing has toughened the terms for people in public housing, who have lost the possibility of tenancy for life and now face three-yearly reviews of their ability to pay a market rent. His government has also tightened criteria for dole recipients; it now offers job-seekers new types of help, with childcare, training and grooming, for instance. But it also demands that the children of job-seekers must be in pre-school once they turn three, and be up to date with health checks. If not, they lose their payments.

Key argues that inequality is not growing worse, but he also concedes it's not really getting better. "From 1984 to 1990 [the time of NZ's pro-market reform drive], inequality widened dramatically," he tells Good Weekend in his office in the Beehive, the ministerial office building in Wellington named for its unusual tapering bulbous form. "From the early 1990s to today, that gap has been consistent, and maybe it's vaguely narrowed." His government is taking measures incrementally to improve care for the disadvantaged, with free breakfasts for schoolkids at all schools that want it, and extra money for social housing, for instance. And he's politically wise to do so: "Not in this election," says journalist Colin James, "but in the next one, inequality will be a vulnerability: income tax cuts for his mates, and everyone else has to pay the GST. And it won't just be about inequality and poverty - it's about who gets the spoils." In opposition, John Key once said: "you can measure a society by how it looks after its most vulnerable; once I was one of them." His mother, Ruth, a schoolgirl escaping Hitler's Austria, fled to Britain in 1939 where she lived with friends, the Key family in Portsmouth. She eventually married George Key, nine years older, a veteran of the war and once-married. Seeking a brighter future, they moved to Auckland, then Christchurch, where Key was born in 1961. George, a heavy drinker, took labouring jobs and then opened his own restaurant, accumulating only debt and unhappiness as he went. He moved out of the family home and died of a heart attack a few weeks later. He was 55. John was seven. Ruth supported John and his two older sisters on a widow's benefit, an Austrian war pension, and her earnings as a night porter and, later, a cleaner. She chose to pay off the business debts her husband had left as a matter of personal honour: it took her five years. By the sixth she'd saved enough to take her kids on a Christmas holiday to Sydney, their first trip on a plane.

Jewishness is matrilineal, but Ruth gave John much more than that. She gave her kids a fierce work ethic and a belief in the power of education. When he wanted to quit school to take up horse training and punting, she crushed the idea. She demanded that everyone bring a conversation topic to the dinner table. Key defined his political views by debating his Labour-voting mother. He was a solid but undistinguished student at Christchurch's Burnside High School. He excelled, however, in school speaking, debating and economics. In his 20s, Key returned his mother's devotion by teaching her to drive, persuading her to give up cigarettes and guiding her into her first sharemarket investments. The cocky young man got his first full-time job as a clothing salesman by browbeating the employer: "I'll save you more money than it'll cost to employ me." It was while watching a documentary on a day in the life of a foreign-exchange dealer with his new wife Bronagh - still his wife today and the mother of their two children, Stephie and Max - that Key was electrified by the idea of trading currency. It was 1985 and NZ's Labour government had just floated the dollar. To get work as a forex dealer, he again browbeat an employer, Australian firm Elders. When the company knocked Key back, he argued and bargained; instead of the standard package of the time of $NZ60,000 in salary plus a car, Key accepted $NZ30,000 and no car. Within a few years he'd be naming his own salary. Sleeping with a Reuters screen by his bed to check rates, he applied himself and soon was impressing other firms. He was recruited by a big US company, Bankers Trust, and started making millions in profit for his firm. "I used to take large short-term risks, whereas a lot of people took smaller, long-term risks," Key recounts. "Mathematically you don't have to be right 50 per cent of the time and wrong 50 per cent of the time. You can be right 20 per cent of the time, as long as you are disciplined about the way you handle your losses." Next came the Wall Street buccaneers, Merrill Lynch. Key started in their Singapore dealing room but saw a chance to go to the firm's forex head office in London. Asked by a visiting senior executive for his opinion of Merrill's trading performance, he replied: "It sucks." Most corporations today would mark down such a non-conformist. Instead, the Gympie-born senior man, Steve Bellotti, threw him a challenge: "If you're so clever, I'll send you up to head office in London, and if you don't make it in 12 months, I'll sack you." Key replied: "If I don't make it in 11 months, I'll quit."

Once again, Key had browbeaten his way into a job. This, however, was the big time. And he prospered under pressure. As Bellotti put it, he "shot the lights out". When Ruth died in 2000, Key reconsidered his life, and the next year walked away from the trillion-dollar casino known as investment banking and called a family summit in NZ. He announced he was going into politics. His sister, Sue, told him: "Don't do it. Everyone hates politicians." But he'd made up his mind. Key returned to Auckland six months later, built a $5 million mansion and, entering parliament in 2002, applied himself to becoming PM. The aspiring leader sought out experienced National Party politicians for advice. One was the former PM Jenny Shipley, who watched him give his first political speech and ranked it as "terrible": he was wooden and his speech was dry. But she recalls she was "satisfied in early conversations, and these were not prudish conversations, that he had the public interest in his mind", so she decided to help him. Another National woman of standing, the party president, Michelle Boag, became a vital ally. The forceful new president was on a mission to clean out the party's dead wood and she adopted Key as part of her fresh kindling. She pitted him against a sitting National MP for pre-selection. He unseated the incumbent. Next, Key had to win a safe National seat, Auckland's Helensville. But he was an unknown and the party was in retreat before a dominant Labour PM, Helen Clark. He did it the old-fashioned way, knocking on some 10,000 doors to woo voters. His two young kids were enlisted; Key paid them 1¢ for every leaflet they delivered. He won his seat narrowly but his party suffered its lowest ever share of the vote, a thrashing. In opposition, Key applied himself again. He stood out as a conservative politician campaigning for centrist causes. His party had declared jihad against the parliamentary seats reserved for Maori; Key changed the policy and reconciled with Maori. He neutralised a losing issue for National, its defence of smacking children, by reaching a compromise with Clark. He promised to build a fast broadband network à la Kevin Rudd but at a much smaller cost of $NZ1.5 billion.

He campaigned to uplift the underclass, though his sincerity was challenged when he said some were "breeding for business", having children so they could claim welfare. He identified himself with the underprivileged and offered his story as national metaphor: "I remember how it felt to peer in the windows of homes that were materially better than my own," Key declared. By the 2008 election, the US financial system was collapsing and the global economic outlook was grave. NZ was a frightened country. Key offered assurance: "I've actually worked in the world of finance and business. Helen Clark hasn't. I've actually picked up a struggling business and made it grow. Helen Clark never has." Even though his former employer, Merrill Lynch, was among the US firms to fall during the GFC, voters accepted his credentials. He and English have built on that trust and go into this year's election in a stronger position than six years ago, defying the usual trajectory. Key has a "great relationship", he says, with Tony Abbott. And the Australian leader recalls that "just days after the Australian election, he took the time to visit and show solidarity. As a very new prime minister, I really appreciated such a show of support." Abbott admires the way he's promoted growth and trade. But Key is a different kind of conservative to Abbott. The Key government has implemented an emissions-trading system, albeit with a low price on emissions of just a few dollars a tonne because it's linked to Europe's scheme. "I believe in human-induced climate change," says Key. "As the global economy strengthens, climate change will come back as a global issue. "Obviously we're different socially. I voted for gay marriage. It was probably the reason the vote passed [in the NZ parliament in 2013]. I believed the arguments put up around gay marriage - that it would undermine my marriage to my wife - were completely false."

Economically conservative but socially liberal, "he's the Malcolm Turnbull of NZ", says a former Merrill Lynch employer, Greg Bundy. But even Turnbull's enthusiasm for Key has a limit: "He's the best leader of any English-speaking country, except for our own leader, of course."