Political diary

Monday

Labour leader Phil Goff returns from his first Progressive Governance conference basking in the coup of being the first New Zealand politician to encounter the leadership of the new US Administration, no less than Vice-President Joe Biden, at a meeting in Chile. He gets in a week ahead of Foreign Minister Murray McCully who is due to meet Secretary of State Hillary Clinton early next week.

It is slightly reminiscent of the to-do back in the 1980s when Winston Peters was rumoured to have met President Ronald Reagan in Washington ahead of his leader at the time, Jim Bolger. The difference is that Peters fuelled the speculation by refusing to confirm or deny it. Goff came back with proof. He has since briefed an official from McCully's office about the meeting.

Wednesday

Just about all parties suspend politics for half an hour to honour Helen Clark for her appointment as United Nations Development Programme Administrator. She is given a standing ovation after John Key's truly magnanimous speech and every leader's speech is applauded as well - except that of Greens' co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons who is not even applauded by her own MPs. In a piece of misjudgment, Fitzsimons lectures Clark on how she should do her job, concluding: "What we wish most for you is that in endless rounds of cocktail parties, travel, high-level meetings and negotiations to which you are no stranger, the most desperate people who rely on UNPD programmes to eat, to be housed, and healthy and educated are always top of your mind." Does she really think cocktail parties are more important to Clark than the poorest and weakest?

Thursday

For the third day running Labour's Trevor Mallard asks a series of seemingly inane procedural questions of Hamilton East MP David Bennett, chairman of the Transport and Industrial Relations select committee. The questions are all about the appearance of ACC Minister Nick Smith before the committee on March 12 and how he came to be there instead of the new ACC board chairman John Judge to talk about the financial review for the 2007-08 year.

Mallard's target is not Bennett, however, but Smith's credibility. Mallard's aim is to try to expose discrepancies between what Smith says happened and what happened. Everybody suspects that Smith called up the more junior select committee chair and told him Judge could not appear for the financial review and that he would appear. Bennett's answers this week have all but confirmed that version: no one was invited to the committee meeting, Bennett finally says on Thursday. The minister had "confirmed" he would attend the meeting. That is rather different to the version Smith gave journalists on March 12 when he said "my appearance arose because the chairman phoned me, the chairman of the committee said that having been advised that Mr Judge was unavailable, would I be available for answering questions about the changes I was making on the board".

We agree with Mallard: they can't both be right.

Alarming to National is the leeway new Speaker Lockwood Smith is giving to Mallard to pursue the line - giving him four chances to ask the same question on some days if he thinks it is not being answered properly.