Dialogue: Out of the frying pan into the fire

By GARTH GEORGE

The two adjectives most often heard to describe our Prime Minister, Helen Clark, are "intelligent" and "decisive." And I must say that for a month or two I thought that those who described her thus had it right.

Now I'm not so sure. Her behaviour lately, particularly as regards education, defence, marijuana and the honours system - along with her obviously deliberate decision not to pay her respects to the Queen while visiting Britain - would tend to indicate that what has appeared to be intelligence is more likely New Age intellectualism, and her decisiveness little else but politically correct ideology put into practice.

Miss Clark (she prefers Miss to Ms but would rather be Helen) is the first Prime Minister we have had who was brought up and educated in the New Age and who would have absorbed political correctness from her first day at school.

She went on to become a university lecturer and nowhere is political correctness more virulent than in academia, where most of it - and certainly its most socially damaging fallacies - was invented.

That could well explain the headmistress aura that permeates almost everything she says and does, and also the emerging heavy streak of Muldoonish autocracy that seems to accompany her leadership of the Labour Administration.

Robert Muldoon was the master power broker. If you were part of his power elite, you did what you were told or you were out on your ear, as many could testify, from former cabinet ministers to cast-off faithful party hacks. Helen Clark is shaping up the same way and that gives me real cause for concern.

Granted, the hands-off, consensus politics of the Bolger and Shipley administrations was not the answer either because, inevitably, it ended up in confusion, in which hands-off became do-nothing and consensus became dithering.

Thus did the political pendulum swing from one extreme to the other and the public, most of whom reside mentally and emotionally somewhere near where the pendulum hangs vertically, finally became fed up and tossed them out on their ears, too.

What we were hoping for from the Labour-led Government was a return to that position where the state and the private sector achieved a proper balance and the man and woman in the street could go about their lawful occasions confident that the nation was operating as it should.

That is not what is happening. What we are seeing is a monstrous swing from too far right to too far left and from ineffective irresolution to interfering paternalism (or, rather, maternalism).

I suppose we all thought that cloth-cap socialism was dead and buried. We were wrong. It is obviously alive and well in the hearts of today's powers that be, and all the more dangerous for being camouflaged by the dissembling hypocrisies of political correctness.

The welshing on the F-16 deal and procrastinating over other urgent defence equipment and manning needs, while yet another report is prepared, is a manifestation of that airy-fairy New Age idea that man is inherently good, the world is a better place than it used to be and that if we're all nice to each other, there won't be any wars.

Well, just remember Iran and Iraq, Iraq and Kuwait, Israel and Palestine, Kosovo, Bougainville, East Timor, Pakistan and India, China and Taiwan, Zimbabwe and any number of other trouble spots around the world where people refuse to be nice to one another.

Helen Clark has just visited Gallipoli. But I suspect her prejudices will have prevented her from seeing the greatest lesson of that tragic campaign - that undertrained officers leading ill-trained and poorly equipped troops leads only to disaster.

The decision to do away with bulk-funding in the education system, even to those schools that relish it and wish to retain it, reeks of the misguided old socialist theory that all children (and teachers) are equal.

And the insistence on doing away with Sir and Dame is redolent with the sophism that all men are equal. The only place that all men have ever been equal is in the eyes of God.

All in all, it looks to me as if we, the long-suffering public, have been cast out of the frying pan right into the fire.

Email: garth_george@herald.co.nz