Claire Harvey: A trotter in the mouth

Mike King is a television comedian who advertises pork for the pig industry. King knows a bit about matters porcine because he used to be a chef, and he whips up tasty-looking piggy recipes in commercials for the New Zealand Pork Industry Board.

King might be an expert bacon-fryer but he is not a good politician.

He had a brief stint in politics on Sunday as Master of Ceremonies at the New Zealand First election campaign launch. His job was to persuade the party supporters that Winston is, in his words, "the man".

In fact, King effectively showed why Winston Peters is an expert. It's just that he did it by making himself look like a pork chop.

"New Zealand First is not anti-immigrants. We're just anti the immigrants we're getting. There are a whole lot of people in this country who we don't want, people who threw their children off boats to come into this country," King said, to gasps of stagey horror from the well-primed crowd.

"What sort of questions were these terrorists asked [by Immigration]? 'So, mate, are you carrying any fruit? Have you been to any farms lately? Are you a terrorist?' No to all three questions - in you come, Osama."

King was talking about a famous Australian scandal, the case of an asylum-seeker vessel named Olong, which sank in an attempt to sail to Australia from Indonesia in October 2001.

At the time, the Australian Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock and Prime Minister John Howard claimed that the asylum seekers had thrown their children overboard to blackmail an Australian Navy vessel, the HMAS Adelaide, into picking them up and taking them to Australia.

The Government produced photographs showing people in the ocean, who they claimed were the jettisoned kids.

The allegation that anyone would deliberately endanger children was horrifying, and had its intended effect - to remind jumpy Australian voters that boat people were immoral, unethical, deeply foreign creatures who didn't even love their own kids.

The children-overboard claim, and the pictures, have since been completely discredited by the Royal Australian Navy, a Senate committee and senior bureaucrats.

Australian sailors handed life-vests to the Olong passengers and told them to jump into the water and swim across to HMAS Adelaide, because their vessel was sinking.

Even the Howard Government now concedes the children were not thrown overboard, but has blamed the Navy for giving it "incorrect information".

The boat people have subsequently won refuge, some in New Zealand, after authorities judged they were Iranians, Afghans and Iraqis fleeing persecution.

Mike King didn't seem aware of any of these developments, and the crowd absolutely loved his "Osama" comparison, roaring with laughter, just as they did when King called Helen Clark "that cow" and when he suggested he and Don Brash could swap wives for a week.

But with his ham-fisted (sorry) effort at political analysis, King made the kind of error Winston Peters would never commit.

The New Zealand First leader knows exactly how to stir up controversy without taking unnecessary risks.

Peters makes a lot of controversial claims - such as last week's revelation that Islam is a "multi-headed serpent" - but is clever and experienced enough to know that you can be as outrageous as you like - as long as you keep things vague. He knows the power of the conspiracy theory and the inside word, of giving people the impression that you have sources, that you know something they don't.

There is no reason for a clever politician to go any further - all Peters has to do is plant the seed of suspicion. He knows that if he declares that his "sources" tell him pockets of radicalism exist in every suburban mosque, his claims cannot be categorically refuted.

It is impossible for Peters' critics to prove that these things are not going on, without obtaining sworn affidavits from every person of Islamic persuasion in the country.

That is the power of suggestion, as opposed to the danger of specifics. And that is where Mike King went wrong, by specifically, and not at all suggestively, repeating a lie, easily disproved with the most basic research.

I wouldn't dream of suggesting Mike King is not funny.

The last person to do that was Jeremy Wells. Wells ran a cartoon segment on his Eating Media Lunch show in 2003, in which even a dog looked bored while watching King's chat show.

King immediately rang Wells' offsider, Lee Baker, leaving a phone message in which he warned Baker to tell his "little wee ****ed-up friend he is ****ing with the wrong person".

No, King definitely has a sense of humour. After all, he was wearing desert boots with his business suit on Sunday.

And he did have one genuinely amusing line.

"You know, people often ask me, 'Mike, what do you really think of Brian Tamaki?' Well, all I can say is 'Man, I wish I thought of it'."

He might say the same of Winston Peters.

* Claire Harvey is a Herald feature writer