Death of Patsy somewhat exaggerated

Lockwood Smith. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Nobody could have guessed that this would be the day the Patsy died.

The Speaker entered Parliament to find himself facing a rambunctious Parliament.

An exultant Labour leader Phil Goff was fresh from a successful annual conference. He had questions - he wanted answers.

He rose, buoyant, to tackle Prime Minister John Key on foreign ownership and the GST increase.

The pair engaged in the tango of jiggery pokery statistics over food prices and foreign land sales for a while before they got down to business.

That happened when Mr Goff asked why Mr Key could describe Labour's new foreign ownership policy as "Stalinist", while in the same breath insist it was exactly the same as the existing law.

Mr Key explained the confusion by adding to it. He critiqued Mr Goff's performance on TVNZ's Q+A on Sunday as "a lot of Qs from Guyon Espiner and not many As from Phil Goff".

He said he had also since revised his opinion of Mr Goff's Road to Stalin experience and decided he was instead crying Chicken Little.

"But it is not Chicken Little he needs to worry about, it is Andrew Little; that is it," he finished, hollering his little joke out above cries of "order!" from the Speaker.

Despite numerous appeals to rein Mr Key in, the Speaker held fast to his traditional policy of "ask a silly question, get a silly answer", saying if MPs asked "provocative" questions, they could not expect Dr Smith to save them from the resulting return salvo.

But by question time's end, Dr Smith had clearly had enough. He declared a war on "gratuitous answers" and obnoxious questions. Worst of all, after Bill English took a question from his own side, so he could criticise Labour, the Speaker took aim at the humble Patsy: "I will not tolerate Patsy questions being used to attack the Opposition".

In that one sentence, the Speaker broke two conventions. The most egregious was to acknowledge the concept of a Patsy even existed. The expected behaviour is to pretend every question asked is a genuine search for illumination - not a Government set-up.

The second was to apparently rule out one of the Government's most potent allies in question time by stripping it of its entire reason for existence - to allow a minister to rip shreds off the follies of the Opposition.

The politicians were gobsmacked. Could Patsy be gone? The last question was over and Dr Smith wrapped up with a resigned "today is today; tomorrow will be another day. Beware, the Speaker will be keen to see a rather different question time".

He meant it as a warning, but the smirk on Bill English's face made it clear that he saw it as a sign that the radical new ruling was time-limited and he, for one, intended to resurrect poor Patsy to live another day.