KEY POINTS:
One Thing we know for sure about politicians is that they never make a decision until they are absolutely sure their backsides are covered, no matter how deleterious to the nation the undue delay might be.
Another thing we know is that most politicians, with only a few
notable exceptions, couldn't find their own bums with both hands in broad daylight.
We know those things because if they weren't so, then the citizens of this country would be in far better shape - economically and socially - than they are.
An example of my second proposition is Finance Minister Michael Cullen, who today will deliver his eighth Budget while we ask ourselves yet again why this critically important task has been left to a man who spent his working life as a university lecturer in history.
I wonder what the chairman of the board and/or the chief executive of a multibillion-dollar corporation - for that is what the Government really is - would do were they to receive an application for the position of chief financial officer from one whose CV disclosed he was a university lecturer, even if his PhD was in social and economic history.
Mind you, when it comes to hoisting vast profits at the expense of the taxpayers (most of whom are wage and salary earners) which big corporations do at the expense of the customers, he would have been a winner.
In fact he would make Ali Baba and his 40 thieves look like a philanthropic society.
And it seems that this year's Budget will bring no relief to taxpayers, except perhaps in some roundabout way that either makes us more beholden to the Government or lets it retain some control over what we do with our money.
But that's what happens when ideology, in this case the socialist dogma that the state always knows best, is allowed to dictate fiscal policy.
Well, let him get on with it.
If there is no real relief for the wage and salary earners in today's Budget, it will be just another nail in Labour's coffin, which we will lay to rest sometime late next year - even if Dr Cullen comes up with blatant bribes in Budget 2008.
Another thing that got up my nose this week - and helped to bring on this particular tantrum - is the Government's unconscionable delay in proscribing so-called party pills, which are in fact poison pills and which have been freely available to all and sundry for five or six years.
For this I blame Jim Anderton, the ex-Labour, ex-NewLabour, ex-Alliance, Progressive Sheikh of Sydenham cum Wazir of Wigram, who, despite vast amounts of evidence over the years as to the dangers of these pills, has still not moved to have them banned.
The Weekend Herald says Anderton might do so at the end of the month, and he justifies the delay by saying he needed to make an "informed decision" based on "clinical evidence".
This despite the fact that these pills - the active ingredient of which was originally used to worm cattle - have been banned in Australia, Britain and the United States; that a clinical trial in Wellington had to be abandoned because 35 of its 64 participants got too dangerously ill to go on; and that hospitals report having to treat poison-pill-poppers for seizures, insomnia, headaches, nausea and vomiting.
I suppose Anderton has been listening to that benighted brigade who have told him that if he makes the pills illegal it will merely drive them underground.
That is patently absurd.
Nine out of 10 people will think twice about breaking the law to get high, which explains why there are so many more alcoholics in society than there are hard-drug addicts.
Just take a look at the results of lowering the drinking age: binge drinking among teens has become epidemic, simply because booze is legally available to children who haven't the sense not to buy it and supply it to their little brothers and sisters.
Finally, I am sick and tired of people who insist on raking up muck that is 20 and more years old and parading it to the public as if it happened last week.
The latest victim of this odious preoccupation with the past is the nation's top policeman, Commissioner Howard Broad.
Who the hell cares if Mr Broad, as a 23-year-old, allowed a dirty movie to be shown at a party?
Who among us didn't do a lot of silly things in our teens and early 20s of which we are now rather ashamed?
In view of today's almost total lack of morality, such dirt-digging reeks of the worst sort of hypocrisy - and reminds me of the words of Jesus Christ: "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone."