Dialogue: Our stupid politicians keep playing the fool

Let's think about just a few of the major issues impinging on the future of New Zealand:

* The Singapore trade agreement.

* The crisis in Fiji, where violence could be setting up a future Northern Ireland or Sri Lanka.

* The capitalisation of the forestry industry to take advantage of a huge growth in tree harvest over the next few years.

* The restoration of overall national and economic confidence.

Let's now consider what has been exercising the minds of our politicians:

* Whether Ruth Dyson is an incompetent drunk and junkie because she had too much to drink before driving and smoked cannabis years and years ago, even though she immediately declared herself guilty of drink-driving and resigned.

* Whether Tariana Turia and Sandra Lee should be allowed to use the word holocaust (with a lower-case h) when referring to the decimation of Maori last century.

* Whether John Tamihere should be allowed to wear jeans or a polo-necked shirt at select committee hearings.

At least Nero played the fiddle while Rome burned. Our legislators play the fool.

But a wave of disgust swept over me as I watched Opposition junior whip Gerry Brownlee on television suggesting someone sober should go over Dyson's paperwork, implying she's a chronic drunk.

In the same spirit of unworldliness that descends to stupidity, I noted that Brownlee was fat.

Fat people are lazy and get tired late in the day, so perhaps we should get someone lean and fit to oversee the work he does in the evenings.

The letters to newspapers throughout the country over the few days following the Dyson affair were a sad indication of the continuing depth of wowserism in this country, of the national impulse to manipulate and control other people's behaviour. This has always been the ugly New Zealander, the puritan not content with living his own life but wanting to live your life as well.

Think of the pursed Presbyterian mouth of Jenny Shipley when she said: "That word [holocaust] must never be used again in a New Zealand context and I do not want to see ministers using the term and causing offence again."

She is outraged that Helen Clark did not make it an edict prohibiting Turia and Lee from using the word in that context.

Is this to become a policy matter? Does Shipley want prime ministers to decide how MPs interpret history and to rule on what words they use in discourse? I'd say the Moriori were consumed by a holocaust. Would Big Jen object to that New Zealand context? Probably not.

How does she feel about wholesale land theft in the Waikato? That probably shouldn't be allowed.

The point is that she may express an opinion on these things, as may anyone else. What she had better stop doing is deciding what opinions are permissible for others and what terms may be used in expressing them.

Helen Clark had begun to sound like Akela, but seems to have pulled back a bit from that; and I must say her patience was saintly during media questioning trying to beat up Dyson's resignation into something it wasn't.

But Shipley at the moment sounds like a narrow-minded bully, so let's hope she also sees the arrogance of her ways.

Then there's the dress code. Frankly, I'd be happy to see them wearing togas and Jandals in the House and at state receptions this summer if they would promise to behave like grownups, focus their minds, talk straight and attempt to tease common sense through debate from the serious issues that confront us.

They'd probably look ridiculous but sound sensible, whereas at the moment they look sensible and sound like kids.

On the subject of Fiji, New Zealand and Australia and other Western countries should exert every bit of influence at their command - including economic sanctions and withdrawal of aid - to stop the terrorism in Fiji and restore democracy before it's too late.

Any New Zealanders who go there on holiday are shameless. Now that the murders have started, the psychopaths who feed on hate and thrive in chaos will surface, as they have in Northern Ireland and Sri Lanka.

The country has this week moved towards a military dictatorship with the issue of gagging orders and house arrests. The further down that road a country goes, the harder the return journey to a civil society becomes.

The conditions for trouble have existed in Fiji for many years.

The Army is proportionately far too large and too close to the seat of power for the good of any country in peacetime in a trouble-free region.

It has been too closely tied with one of two antagonistic ethnic groups and many of its leaders carry a sense of religious, racial and cultural superiority.

Those are incendiary ingredients for vain and unscrupulous power-mongers like Rabuka and Speight.

If the problem is not fixed soon, this region may become more politically unstable than it's ever been.