John Roughan: Mural saved by PC fanaticism

Every so often I like to lose myself in visual art. I know nothing about it, as might very soon be evident, but find if I blank out the mind, drift around a gallery and refuse to let conscious thought intrude on what comes through the eyes, the odd painting or object works a treat.

It stimulates some sort of mental activity that is not thought and should not be forced into words. It feels like a connection with something fine and true that surprised even the artist, I suspect.

As I say, it happens rarely, but often enough to draw me to a gallery if I have a few hours to myself. It has to be done solitary; there is nothing I want to say about anything I see.

With such a primitive appreciation of what I like I probably should resist the urge to criticise what I don't. But when a piece of art is put on the public landscape and is so jaw-droppingly bad that its very presence is an insult to the community, criticism feels like a civic duty.

It is more than insulting when it stands in the name of one of the causes protected by the modern puritanism that we call political correctness. It then becomes slightly chilling.

Bad art in public places has been one of the hallmarks of authoritarian regimes of the left and right. Places like the former Soviet Union were littered with terrible monuments and murals to worthy causes and indeed, Auckland's memorial to women's suffrage, a tiled mural in Khartoum Place, does bear a resemblance to socialist realism.

It lacks the firm jaws, brave families and big flags of the old workers' paradise but its amateurish flourishes, witless symbolism and shallow realism carry the same implied message. It says, "We know this is terrible but that is the point. We are strong enough to put this here and you can't do anything about it."

Embarrassed citizens might be able to pass it off as a relic of 1893 were it not for the fact that it prominently proclaims its dedication to the centenary of women's suffrage. Just 12 years ago a committee of sensible women adopted this kitsch to commemorate the vote won by their Victorian forebears and are determined the city must keep it.

When they heard the council's civic designers were contemplating its removal as part of a facelift for Khartoum Place, they arranged to meet at the monument, summoned the Minister of Women's Affairs and resolved to put the mayor on the spot. By Wednesday, Dick Hubbard had already bent with the breeze and promised the memorial would remain. But the women cheerfully assembled anyway.

Lianne Dalziel, looking bemused, called it "this wonderful mural" and declared its survival to be "a win for Auckland, a win for women, a win for the country". The mayor said it was important to preserve the city's heritage.

But heritage can be highly selective. While the women would not ditch an eyesore of only a dozen years, they would happily see the little plaza lose its Khartoum commemoration and be renamed Kate Sheppard Place.

I kept waiting for the PC eradicator to pop up. If Wayne Mapp was on the job that Don Brash has given him he would have been there. When Hubbard corrected himself for saying the word "ladies", I realised finally there was no hope.

Seriously, the National leader's silly creation has succeeded only in giving political correctness renewed confidence. Puritans immediately demand that Brash and the hapless Mapp explain exactly what they meant by the term and of course they couldn't, not in a sound bite anyway.

So the PC concluded that the phrase meant whatever its users wanted it to mean, and therefore it meant nothing, as they suspected all along. Since then we have been seeing, hearing and reading political correctness with a vengeance.

This week, an Auckland Regional Council transport committee member, Sandra Coney, issued the kind of complaint we haven't heard for a while. She had heard a bus advertisement that referred to "birds" and that was sexist. That sent the Regional Transport Authority chief executive, Alan Thompson, scrambling for a transcript.

"We'll take it up [with the advertising agency] as a matter of urgency," he said.

On Thursday Charmaine Pountney positively glowed with political correctness. "Personal rudeness, institutional racism and sexism are unsafe, unjust and unacceptable," she wrote. " If we want a better society, we all have to be PC - personally courteous, professionally competent and publicly civil."

Brash and Mapp are on a hiding to nothing because political correctness is exactly that - correct. It is cannot be opposed, let alone eradicated, with respectable politics. It is correct but excessive; it is principle applied to a ridiculous degree.

At one level it operates by the oppressive use of terms such as "unacceptable" and "inappropriate" without explanation. In other contexts it demands that we suspend our critical faculties.

It is sexist, I suppose, to condemn a feminist monument not matter how abysmal its art, and racist of London rugby writers to find the haka unpleasant, though it is meant to be. When Tame Iti's deliberately fearsome visage is by a British firm to promote home security, it seems sacrilegious.

Thank heaven for Pansy Wong. When a parliamentary opponent mimicked her accent she rebuked a colleague for acting on the assumption she would care. At the end of a gagging week that was a breath of fresh air.