Dominic George: Politics The zealots wind me up

Winston Peters is wrong to say voters just want to know policy. Photo / Stephen Parker

As the election campaign gets interesting, many still fit the facts to their own fixed ideas

I love me some dirty politics, but I can't abide zealots; and we've seen both come to the fore over the last week. With just under a month to go until the country takes to the polls, the election campaign is finally starting to get interesting.

I'm making an attempt to read the Hager book, if for no other reason than to be informed. I suspect many reporters and interviewers have asked, and will ask, questions of politicians and hangers-on about the claims made in the book without having read it. It sounds absurd but, trust me, you would be staggered at the lack of background reading and information gathering employed by some in our national media. It's like trying to put up a fence without the posts.

I try to make it a general rule never to interview an author or subject of a book if I haven't at least attempted to read it - it's more common courtesy than anything else. The sad part is authors are generally surprised when they learn I've read their work, rather than the other way around.

Deputy Prime Minister Bill English, Labour's Primary Industries spokeman Damien O'Connor and New Zealand First leader Winston Peters have all told me this week on the Farming Show that people aren't interested in gratuitous mud-slinging and would rather hear about policy. Hell no! With all due respect to the Right Honourables, no one's buying that line at all.

People choose who they vote for based on a range of different things, and personality is most definitely one of them. Do I like that bloke or this bloke? Women are serial offenders here - they make decisions based on "look" and "feel" all the time. That's just how we're hard-wired. That's precisely why credibility is attacked - if people didn't care about personality and were only interested in policy, it wouldn't matter what they did outside of their brief in the strictest sense of the term.

Let's be honest, the only policy we really want to hear is the one that tells us how much more money we're going to get from that lot compared to how much we're going to get from the other bunch. Maybe that's just my shallow view of things, but as Jerry once said to George, "just when I thought you couldn't get any more shallow, you manage to drain just a little bit more out of the pool".

It's all very well to sit back and tut-tut over the squabbling politicians, and maybe there's a perception this election could be more spiteful and nasty than normal.

But politics, by its very nature, is a dirty game. In fact, it's downright bloody filthy. Nothing much has changed except the manner in which the information is divulged. Those of you on the wrong side of 40 may recall the "Moyle affair" of 1977. I wasn't around then, but I've learned that Colin Moyle was widely regarded as one of the best Ministers of Agriculture this country had ever seen. But when Prime Minister Robert Muldoon learned he may replace Bill Rowling as party leader, he accused Moyle in Parliament of having been questioned by the police on suspicion of homosexual activities. Those said activities were illegal in New Zealand at the time and Moyle eventually resigned because, he said, "the whole thing just made me sick". Filthy but effective politics.

What's equally grubby, but a whole lot less intelligent, is the choosing of political parties like a sports team. The amount of sycophantic blind loyalty shown to political parties is absurd in the extreme.

I've seen it on all sides over a long period of time but it's become glaring in the past week. There's nothing wrong with saying you want a particular side to win for whatever reason, but making excuses for every mistake they make and criticising opposing parties based on some perceived ideology is so brainless it should preclude these people from voting on the grounds of extreme stupidity.

If a party on the other end of the political spectrum makes a good point, it won't kill you to admit it; you can still vote for whoever you want. Equally, if your party proposes or does something stupid or downright skulduggerous there's no harm in being able to acknowledge that either.

Some people do themselves no favours. A zealot in any walk of life is a dangerous entity; a political zealot is a ticking time bomb.