Rosemary McLeod: Acts of stupidity

There's no need for satire in a country that does it naturally. We have the Act Party and need little more. Let me explain.
In fits of gentility, my mother used to make fancy desserts in tall parfait glasses, layers of custard, fruit and whipped cream, say, with a cherry on top. To eat these you needed special long-handled parfait spoons - a dainty crocheted place mat wouldn't have gone amiss - and this reminds me of a proverb and Act's leader.
"He who sups with the devil will need a long spoon" - like my mother's long-handled ones - when dealing with irrepressible types like John Ansell, author of a self-published book of verse - and CD - entitled I Think The Clouds are Cotton Wool.
On the day his latest advertising campaign was launched, marketing director Ansell was absent from the conference.
The next day he resigned from the party after saying "white cowards" were not standing up to the "Maorification" of the country.
Act leader Don Brash could not be seen to publicly condone that sort of thing, let alone the verse - whimsical would put it kindly - yet such topics draw together the most delightful of pink-skinned blokes; the thinkers. Embodiments of all that is racially and culturally superior, they know they are endowed - probably by God - with special insights of a purely logical kind, as well as superior mating tackle, which helps with logic and stuff like that.
Women have been dealt with - logically - twice in the past couple of weeks by these better-endowed sorts, first by sacked Employers and Manufacturers Association boss Alasdair Thompson, who pointed out that we menstruate, and therefore can't be the equals of men in the workplace, and now by Ansell.
He explained that Act's advertising concepts - which he'd apparently been in eager charge of - should focus on men because women don't want to "talk bluntly" and are "ruled by their emotions". Men ultimately defer to the brain for hard decisions, he added, while women look to their, you know, weepy bits. And he was happy to be evicted from Act, he said, because they were collectively "white cowards."
The world hasn't heard such rhetoric since Enoch Powell and, as luck would have it, he and Ansell appear to have knowledge of the classics in common. The ancients believed women's wombs and uteri could travel around their bodies causing all manner of hysterical carry-on - hence the very word hysteria, which proves once and for all that we're loony-tunes.
Ansell did not spare Maori, who he said had "gone from the Stone Age to the space age in 150 years, and haven't said thanks". He is evidently a believer despite all the evidence - unemployment, drug and alcohol addiction, high rates of imprisonment, poor health, shorter life expectancy - that Maori are somehow ripping us all off.
I rather think Ansell has himself demonstrated how it's possible to leap from the space age to the Stone Age in a single bound, back to when involuntary grunts passed for dialectic.
Those were the days, when Maori would have been taught to be thankful for chickenpox, measles, influenza, and the host of other diseases from the Northern Hemisphere that nearly wiped them out, and grateful that they lost their ancestral lands thanks to the workings of a legal system they had no part in creating, and whose machinations were foreign to them.
There is a Disney version of the settlement of this country by Europeans which all of us learned from the back of cereal packets. But there is another reality in the consequences for Maori, just as there has been for native people wherever Europeans have moved in and taken over. Act's latest advertising slogan, "Fed Up With Pandering to Maori Radicals?" panders to people who insist the shared history and common plight of Maori, Native Australians and Native Americans is their own fault. Such a belief, whatever Ansell says, is infinitely less about logic than emotion.