Dialogue: Suffocating in a cloud of bulldust

If a young woman schoolteacher felt constrained to resign because some parents objected to her sprinkling her charges with fairy dust, then an older woman Prime Minister ought to feel constrained to resign for allowing the whole nation to be nearly buried in bulldust.

While our economy reels and our dollar's value falls through the international floor, while fuel prices take off like an Olympic sprinter and the prices of other essential (and non-essential) imports take their marks, our Prime Minister gallivants off to New York for a meaningless, though no doubt ego-feeding, talkfest.

And while she's there she blithely announces that the idea of merging our nearly valueless currency with Australia's has merit and that she doesn't think "we should get silly notions of sovereignty stand in the way."

Now that is bulldust, and I'll bet that when it landed it made the Aussie delegation sneeze in between their giggles. For, as one writer to the page opposite commented: "Why would the Aussies want to carry a country with a total population the size of one of its cities, particularly when some one-third of its population is on some kind of benefit?" Which is hitting the nail squarely on the head.

We elected this Government because the other lot had got completely out of hand and so far out of touch with the electorate that they might as well have been on Mars. Yet in nearly 12 months this lot has done absolutely nothing to convince me that it is any more in touch with the concerns and aspirations of the folk on the Mt Roskill bus than its predecessors.

It has instead, with the exception of bludgeoning through the Employment Relations Act - and quite rightly, too - concerned itself with trivialities such as giving huge sums of taxpayers' money to the elitist "arts" industry, bending over backwards to curry favour with Maori while in fact engineering reverse discrimination - some would say apartheid - and treating the Treaty of Waitangi as if it had been carried down Mt Cook engraved on tablets of stone.

It promised to end golden handshakes in the bureaucracy - and hasn't - but sits back and lets the taxpayer shovel out tens of thousands of dollars in so-called compensation to four gang thugs, three of whom are still serving long jail sentences for things like attempted murder, rape and aggravated robbery.

Corrections Minister Matt Robson hides behind the Solicitor-General's view that a civil action against the Crown would have succeeded. How could he possibly know? And who is he to pre-empt the course of natural justice, which is one of the foundations upon which this nation has been built?

The Minister of Justice, that feminist paragon of political correctness Margaret Wilson, issues a three-sentence apology from the Crown. And while the bulldust is still settling, we, the poor taxpayers - who are denied by law any lump-sum compensation for anything - get saddled with the huge bill for this political gutlessness.

And if you think this is madness, how about the decision that dance and drama will become compulsory school subjects from 2003 under the new arts curriculum? Did you ever hear anything so absolutely insane?

Here we are in a country whose once-proud education standards have slipped so far down the world scale as to be almost out of sight, with an illiteracy problem affecting nearly one-third of the population, and the powers that be decide that children should be forced to learn to dance and playact.

Doesn't that, along with the continual efforts to do away with external examinations and the ditching of bulk-funding of those schools that want it, make a mockery of all that pre-election talk about preparing our children to participate in the vaunted knowledge economy?

Now, what about this? Lesbians and single women are to be entitled to state-paid fertility treatment under rules about to be introduced.

And this in a country in which tens of thousands of women are already on the domestic purposes benefit, in which health services are stretched to the limit, in which junior doctors and nurses are woefully underpaid, in which tens of thousands of people are on waiting lists for life-saving, pain-relieving and other operations that would considerably improve their quality of life, and in which unborn babies are disposed of (also at the taxpayers' expense) at the rate of more than 15,000 a year.

Have our politicians and bureaucrats gone stark raving mad? If they haven't, there can be only one other explanation: their brains have become starved of oxygen as they suffocate under the weight of their own bulldust.

garth_george@herald.co.nz