Diana Wichtel: Campaign verging on madness

Perhaps it's not her control-freak inclinations or even her hubris. Helen Clark's potentially fatal flaw could be a simple lack of imagination. What else could account for her foisting an election campaign on us while the weather is at its most wrist-slitting and the kids are on holiday?

It's bad enough coping all day with the bickering, cheating, name-calling and bad language without having it beaming into the lounge in the guise of election coverage every night.

Politicians. As role models go, I'd rather the 10-year-old watched The Osbournes. Can they witter on, mouthing meaningless slogans until you want to throw something at them (see National MP Anne Tolley's website www. annetolley.co.nz)? Yes, they bloody well can.

Excuse the language, but they started it. National's Great Helmsperson Jim Bolger first introduced verbal vileness to family viewing with his "Bugger the pollsters".

Now we get Bill English murmuring "Poor little buggers".

Also worrying is a website, inaccurately entitled "No Crap!" (www.nocrap.org.nz), which uses toilet humour and the wisdom of Murray Mexted to get young hipsters to vote National. Yeah, right.

Cheating figures even more strongly than usual this election, thanks to Paintergate. Since the mildly damning police report Bill English is all but suggesting we check the PM's qualifications to make sure she didn't acquire them at Denver State University. How can we trust her now?

Indeed. I could add that I'd trust about as far as I could throw him a man who has been compared on the hustings to an undertaker, a Thunderbirds puppet and a corpse. But, judging by Bill's performance in the ring, that could be quite far.

Of course Clark deserves everything she's so gleefully getting from a relieved English. She thought the painting business was a trivial matter and lacked the imagination to see that others might view it differently.

Now we learn the painting was destroyed by a member of her staff. Oh dear. Give or take its artistic merit, the painting had become something of a cultural icon - the best non-existent painting not painted by a Prime Minister. I'd like to have it.

And destroying art has very nasty historical associations. It is certainly not something one expects from the office of the Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage.

When asked what should be done with the reacquired painting, Clark apparently told the staff member to do what she liked with it. That is possibly what one Taleban said to another when asked what should be done with those pesky giant Buddhas.

The PM's inability to bend is also making the whole GM dust-up even more polarised than it was always going to be. The migraine-inducing debate is not advanced by actors and former pop stars weighing in.

Celebrities tend to make unconvincing spokespeople for the masses, particularly the ones who come back here for their piece of primitive paradise after tiring of glamour and fame.

They have a certain stake, as do the Greens, in keeping us a sort of rustic holiday resort. Face it: should they find themselves in need of the evil benefits of modern Frankentechnology, they are only a first-class plane trip away from the real world. Unlike the rest of us.

For those of us not as ruthlessly rational as Helen or as religiously convinced as Jeanette, the GM debate can make your brain hurt. The Greens say they are against any GM tests outside the lab unless science can prove they are 100 per cent safe. As they know, there's no such thing as 100 per cent proof, scientific or any other kind.

There is, as yet, no scientific proof that organic foods offer real health benefits, yet that doesn't stop the Greens from proclaiming the goal of making us an organic nation by 2020.

It doesn't help that Clark and Fitzsimons are really quite alike, despite their public differences. From memory, Clark looked a lot like a Green Party member before that image makeover.

And Fitzsimons shows a Clarkian failure of imagination when she rejects, outright and forever, potential GM solutions that might bring considerable benefits.

Pete Hodgson likes to taunt Greens with possible GM solutions to possum fertility. He has a point. The Greens want to reject technology that could take very real health risks like possum poison out of the environment. Wake up and smell the 1080, Jeanette.

Still, I'm glad the Greens are there. Except when they insist on dancing, they serve a useful purpose. As Clark should know, we of her generation have been awaiting the apocalypse since the Bay of Pigs. At a level of almost tribal consciousness, children of the nuclear age are hyper aware of the species' vulnerability.

The Greens represent the primitive but necessary survival instinct that stops us from destroying ourselves just because we can. It's a tough job but somebody sadly - mostly pretty annoying people - has to do it.

Right now, with Corngate on her plate, the PM could scarcely be more annoyed. Clark is finding her integrity questioned over this one too. Imagine! That's the trouble. She can't.

Her job is to answer the questions asked, which she is good at. It is not to fume over them being asked in the first place. Stalking out of interviews with Aussie media and snarling at John Campbell make her look more rattled than righteous.

It's time for both increasingly unbending sides in this debate to have a look at the forest - not one single, possibly genetically modified tree. I think it's the Chinese who define madness as "having only one story".

Both the PM and Jeanette would do well to bear that in mind.

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