Barry Soper: The well rehearsed arguments in the Beehive

Like housing, the arguments for and against genetically modified food have been well rehearsed in Parliament. Photo / Mark Mitchell

This was going to be a piece about housing and how we've seen the cost of them rising at the fastest rate over the past three months than they have in twelve years. We all know who was in power when they had their last spurt then, don't we?

You car hear the clarion call from the National benches that house prices are out of control and when is this incompetent Clark Government going to do something about them?

We wait with bated breath until Sunday when angry Andrew Little tells us what his Government's going to do about the crisis that they've tried unsuccessfully to get the incumbents to submit to.

It seems the incumbents have thrown up their hands in horror at the response their billion dollar binge on roads, power poles and sewers has been met with. They're now deferring to the Reserve Bank to tell us how they're going to drive the speculators out of the market.

Then the piece was going to be about the Nobel brains trust putting their fully stuffed heads together and declaring there's nothing wrong with genetically modified food, there's no risk to human health and those who think their is are emotional and dogmatic.

It certainly got The Greens' James Shaw barking mad at the notion, dismissing the more than a hundred Nobel laureates, who've put pen to an open letter saying scientifically tampered with food can actually do more good than harm, citing Golden Rice, a crop that's been engineered to contain Vitamin A which reduces disease and death in the third world.

But like housing, the arguments for and against have been well rehearsed.

Then there was that hoary old issue of how international students, 125,000 of them, are flooding into the country and taking the all the supermarket checkout jobs. Just as the latest lot of figures were spilling off the Tertiary Minister's printing press, the custodian of the golden immigration gate Winston Peters was sharpening his pencil, telling the Beehive to have a look at how many of them are here with dodgy documents.

Yeah well that's another well rehearsed argument as was the Peters preaching from the Parliamentary steps to the elderly, telling them how those up on the Beehive's ninth floor are undermining their free travel on his super gold card.

Peters did stop for a breather though and was asked about his Brexit buddy Nigel Farage's resignation as the UK's Independence Party leader who invited him to speak to the House of Lords last month.

Peters says the party's purpose was always to do themselves out of a job. No chance of that with New Zealand First, obviously there's still a lot of work to be done.