Jim Hopkins: It's a tough life when everyone knows better than you

It's not easy being thick. It never has been, of course, but it's particularly difficult now when the world is full of people who know how to do things properly.

Because they're not like us, these people who know how to do things properly. They're not thick. They're experts. They understand complex issues like crime and punishment, which the Chief Justice has been very kindly helping us thickos to understand.

And also things like exams and how to run a wananga. The experts understand these things and quite properly think they should be left alone to look after them. Which, by and large, they do pretty well. Certainly much better than we would because we're thick.

We wouldn't know how to run a wananga, for example. But the experts do. Provided they have $239 million to do the job properly. Give 'em that and they're away laughing. Pretty soon they have 34,000 tertiary students all "staircasing" madly.

"Staircasing" - now there's an interesting word. Us thickos would probably say "staircasing" is a flash way of saying somebody's "going up in the world". But your average expert knows that "going up in the world" is a values-laden, culturally based, bourgeois concept that will alienate marginalised socioethnic groups, so they say "staircasing".

And that's what they're doing at the old Wananga o Outer Roa. Although, actually, they might not be. Various thickos have started grizzling about waste and profiteering and people lining their own pockets and such.

Fortunately, Trevor Mallard's on the case and he's an expert in such matters. He was the bloke who exposed Tuku's $85 underpants, remember? So he knows his rorts from his oughts does our Trev.

And he's told us that he's been very worried about the wananga for at least five years. So what he's done is give them more and more money to spend. And now he's called in the Auditor-General.

Because wasting all, or most, of $239 million is "a matter of public concern". Not a scandal, mind. The undies were a scandal. The wananga's "a matter of public concern".

So that's all right, then. Us thickos can go back to sleep. No need to fret about that. Or the exams, either. Sure, there's been a bit of a stuff-up, as us thickos might say. But it's going to be sorted. They're going to have a which-hunt, you see.

To put you in the picture here, a which-hunt is very like a witch-hunt except that with a which-hunt you have a whole lot of expert politicians running round saying "which expert bureaucrat can we blame for this festering mess?"

Eventually, of course, they find one and some minor expert gets transformed into a thicko and everyone's happy. Somebody's been punished and life goes on.

But things aren't so simple when it comes to crime. In fact, they get very complicated. Far too complicated for us thickos.

Oh, sure, we're worried about the crime rate and the experts say that's all right. We're allowed to worry about that. We just shouldn't ring talkback and demand feeble-minded, simplistic solutions such as tougher sentences.

That's where we get it wrong. Because we're thick. We haven't studied the research and looked at the data and considered the purposes of sentencing which apparently, according to the Chief Justice, include "denunciation, deterrence, rehabilitation and reintegration".

Silly old us. We thought it had something to do with punishment. But that's such a punishing word. Far better to say "denunciation" and save the punishment for naughty bureaucrats. Or people who cause workplace stress.

Punishment's fine for them but not for sentencing, apparently. Denunciation is quite sufficient there. Actual punishment isn't actually something the Chief Justice - or perhaps legislation - is terribly keen on, at least not the thick idea of punishment which is "lock 'em up and throw away the key".

That might seem like an easy answer "in the age of talkback", the Chief Justice told an expert conference of international criminologists a few days ago, but it isn't.

Things are much more complicated than that, said Dame Sian. In fact, they're so complicated that not even the experts have quite managed to sort them out yet.

"We continue to struggle with the disparate ends of sentencing," said the Chief Justice to the criminologists, "and the lack of a coherent theory of punishment or provide guidance to judges and to quell those who believe the sentencing judge is a free-wheeling palm tree, accountable to no one".

Well, she's right, of course. Especially about the "free-wheeling palm tree". Every day, you hear talkback callers describe one judge or another as "a free-wheeling palm tree".

Even the thickest thicko can be reassured that someone with so lucid a grasp of metaphor will be able to unravel the tangled skein of modern criminology. Especially since she cited conclusive Canadian research based on 30,000 inmates, which reportedly showed that "longer prison sentences might even have increased reoffending, while community sentences might be more effective in reducing crime".

Now, the thicko would probably say: "Strewth, there's an awful lot of mights there, mate. If they looked at 30,000 crims, you'd expect them to reach a definite conclusion". Which only goes to show your average thicko will never be an expert. And also why they clamour for tougher sentences.

Maybe they don't expect tougher sentences to reduce offending. Just interrupt it for longer. Because, in the end, they don't trust the "free-wheeling" judges and criminologists and psychologists and probation officers and parole boards.

Because they're thick.