Dialogue: Of power cuts, prostitutes and the first scarlet woman

By GARTH GEORGE

It must be true that the more things change the more they stay the same I thought when I read of the electricity shortages threatening to bring us blackouts in the next month or so.

It took me back to the late 1940s when my father was organiser for the Southland subdivision of the National Party, which consisted of the Wallace, Awarua and Invercargill electorates.

Before the 1949 election he was given a 16mm projector and a propaganda film - intended to show the ruling Labour Government in a bad light - which he carted round the province to show at election meetings.

We had a preview at home, and I remember as if it were yesterday one segment of the film which showed a family sitting round the kitchen table at dinner listening to the radio. The power went off and out came the candles.

I don't recall the words, but the message must have been that if National were elected to Government, power cuts would be a thing of the past. It must have worked because National won the election and Sid Holland became Prime Minister.

And although his Government was elected on a platform of "private enterprise", Holland would never even have dreamed of abrogating the state's responsibility to control the generation and supply of electricity.

But that's by the by. I've been in the newspaper game long enough never to be surprised at how many people read things into what they see in the paper that were never there.

Often I receive letters from readers accusing me of saying things I never said or taking stands I never took. It goes with the journalists' territory and I'm used to it, but I expected better of Sue Bradford who, with her sidekick Nandor Tanczos, I admire for their idealism and eccentricity, of which there aren't nearly enough these days.

When I wrote about prostitution a couple of weeks ago, I did not do so from what Ms Bradford in her Dialogue page piece on Monday called my "spiritual base". I wrote purely from the perspective of human rights and the protection of women.

Ms Bradford is persuaded that the Prostitution Reform Bill will "promote the rights, health and safety of those adults who choose to work in the sex industry and their clients".

My argument, which took no moral, spiritual or religious stance at all, was that the bill will have exactly the opposite effect - and I stand by that.

Just as messing with the drinking age has (already) created a huge increase in teenage drinking and all the aggro and tragedy that come with it, and just as the proliferation of gambling joints has created a huge increase in problem gambling and all the suffering that comes with that, so the decriminalisation of prostitution will bring with it a whole new set of sexual and social problems that sooner or later - and soon at the latest - we as a society will have to cope with.

Although I am never averse to quoting the Bible, I was intrigued that Ms Bradford should indulge in biblical exegesis, even if only as a red herring.

Let me tell you a Bible story about one of the most enigmatic characters in the Old Testament, a woman called Rahab, a harlot of Jericho, a city that stood thousands of years BC on the banks of the Jordan River.

On the other side of the river were camped the 12 tribes of Israel, preparing to cross the Jordan into the land God had promised them. Their leader, Joshua - in whose Old Testament book this tale is told - sent a couple of his men into Jericho to spy out the city and, for reasons we are not told, they lodged with Rahab.

Somehow the king got to hear of this and sent for Rahab, ordering her to turn the Israelite spies over to his agents. But she, who acknowledged the power of the the Israelites' God, had hidden them and told the king they had left the city the night before.

And while the king's men went after them, Rahab lowered the pair down the city wall into which her house was built, first obtaining a promise from them that when the Israelites took the city, she and her whole family would be spared.

(The rope she used was scarlet-coloured and I suspect that's where the epithet "scarlet woman" came from.)

So Joshua and his hordes, having crossed the Jordan dry-footed after God held back the waters, marched round Jericho with trumpets blaring and people shouting until the walls tumbled down and he took the city, razed it by fire, and his troops killed every man, woman, child and animal in it - except for Rahab the harlot and her family, who lived happily ever after under God among the Israelites.

I just pray that some of today's harlots, soon to be victims of ill-considered legislation, will be able to live happily every after, too.

* garth_george@nzherald.co.nz.