Garth George: Woe betide those who build housing on a flood plain

I have known for years that the world is mad and getting madder, and at the weekend I was reminded of just how mad it has become, in this country in particular.

The reminders came courtesy of the Sunday Star-Times and kept my jaw down round my navel for four consecutive pages.

The first was a report that plans for a multimillion-dollar estate on a Coromandel flood plain have been permitted because ... wait for it ... residents will be taught to drive a jet boat to rescue themselves if their homes are threatened by floodwaters.

An independent commissioner has allowed the development in spite of opposition from the local district council's consultants.

The houses, coming at about $1 million a pop, will be built on 2m high platforms and be hooked up to a flood early-warning system monitored by a security firm. The estate will have an evacuation plan and residents will be trained to drive the jet boat to be parked permanently on the site.

No notice appears to have been taken of the council's advice that the Tairua River area has flooded badly at least four times since 1974, let alone the common knowledge of what has lately happened in the lower North Island, at Maketu and elsewhere, and warnings that more disastrous flooding is likely as weather patterns keep changing.

Mother Nature must have a grin on her face several rainstorms wide.

On the next page we're told that an Auckland University associate professor, who specialises in "feminist and queer theory", was given $48,350 from a university research fund to study "the fake orgasm".

And that's on top of nearly $500,000 given to the same person and two others from the Marsden Fund to research "a cultural history of sex".

The cultural genealogy of the fake orgasm would, the newspaper said, include when ideas of it first arose and how they have developed since and quoted the university website thus:

"Through these two case studies, Jagose will argue that the allegedly common language of orgasm marks a productive faultline for everyday understandings of the body and sexual desire, giving rise to a different framework for thinking about 20th-century understandings of sexual subjectivity and identity."

Gee, whiz! Aren't you all proud that so little public money is going to give mankind such a quantum jump in the sum of our knowledge? And still to come is the $465,000 grant over three years for Jagose and two other Auckland University academics to write a cultural history of sex, which will include case studies of "the hustler, the modern orgasm, the transgendered subject and a microstudy of sexual culture in Auckland". Aren't you on the edge of your seat?

Jagose, incidentally, was a member of the humanities panel that made the huge grant, although it has been reported that she took no part in the discussion on her team's proposal.

The Sunday Star-Times said Ms Jagose did not return its calls. I'm not surprised.

On the next page I read, with utter astonishment, that people are buying false nails to put on cats to stop them damaging people and furniture with their claws. The vinyl claw caps are glued on to a cat's or dog's clipped nails, making them useless as weapons of destruction.

The story quotes a Canterbury woman who related that her female cat had been banned by vets and pet groomers because of its ferocity and had trashed a lounge suite, and then - glory be! - she came across claw caps. She proclaims that while her cat's claws might now be harmless, given half a chance "she'll take your arm off at the elbow".

Now I've had a cat about the house all my life - and never once have I had one that scratched or bit either people or furniture. That's because if the cat didn't learn as a kitten not to scratch and/or bite, it was put in a weighted sack and dropped off a bridge.

On the next page was a story I'd rather not have read because it not only reveals madness, but deep-seated badness: during the school holidays some parents are dumping their children at shopping malls, swimming pools, libraries and adventure playgrounds and leaving them there by themselves for the day.

Among them, according to a Wellington childcare worker, have been unsupervised children who are "too young to know their mother's name"; and a Wellington City Council recreation official says there are "a couple of cases a month" in which children younger than 8 are left unsupervised at swimming pools.

This atrocity perpetrated on a generation of our children left me feeling sick - and infinitely sad for the schoolteachers, social workers, police, judges, prison staff and hospital workers, among others, who are going to have to clean up the mess left by this evil parental selfishness and dereliction of responsibility.

But that wasn't the end of it. This week the Herald has been telling us all ad nauseam about those mad people who want to ride bicycles in car-clogged Auckland and who reckon we motorists should make allowances for them - when we don't even make allowances for each other.

Then there's the parson who on this page on Tuesday blindly proclaimed as out of step with the wishes of its members the Presbyterian Church's decision to ban from leadership heterosexuals and homosexuals living in other than a legitimate marriage.

Yet the church's highest court, consisting of its clergy and elected representatives of all its members, passed the ban with a vast majority of 65 per cent to 35 per cent.

His arithmetic seems to be on a par with his theology.