Paul Holmes: Politicos' tall tales, rich pickings

We have had the budget. It was, as predicted, largely about tax. And everyone got something. It was pretty clever. It seems to have upset no one particularly. I hear no squealing.

Dropping the company tax rate to go head-to-head with Australia was long overdue.

The Budget itself may not have been a step change but there are only a certain number of options when it comes to money and even fewer when you're broke, when you are a poor country, which New Zealand is.

I was more interested this week in some juicy political stories inside the United States at the moment, as the country gears up for the November Congressional elections and the candidates start squaring off and the vetters start doing the probing into private lives.

A couple of outlandish fraudsters have come to light. The first is Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut Attorney-General.

He is running for the United States Senate. He will not be doing so for long.

Mr Blumenthal likes to attend veteran commemorations. He speaks highly and mightily of the importance of Americans honouring the service of military men and women.

He said to such a gathering a couple of years ago, "We have learnt something important since the days that I served in Vietnam." At another function he said, "I served during the Vietnam era."

Then referring to the reaction the troops got when they came home from Vietnam he said, "I remember the taunts, the insults, sometimes even physical abuse."

Trouble is, he never served in Vietnam at all. He did everything he could to get out of serving there, managing to get himself five deferments between 1965 and 1970, the dirtiest, most murderous years of the war.

During that time, while others of his generation were dying in that hopeless conflict, Blumenthal managed to finish his Harvard law degree, enjoy a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford, work as an assistant to the owner of the Washington Post, Katharine Graham, and then get a job in the Nixon White House.

Well, eventually, when he could get out of service no longer, he got himself into the Marine Forces Reserve, which meant - so I read - that his chances of being sent to Vietnam were pretty much nil.

Mostly the Marine Forces Reserve did drills in Washington DC and got involved in important projects like Toys for Tots.

Blumenthal has not admitted he lied; he says he mis-spoke. What has people most annoyed about his continued and sustained lie is he speaks to veterans' groups as if he is most certainly one of them. In fact, of course, he did whatever it took at the time not to be.

I cannot understand why an intelligent man, rated a brilliant and incisive lawyer, would have the gall and the stupidity to offer this deception, to utter such a fiction.

It is not a lie about having been to, I don't know, Yellowstone National Park, say, when he never has. This is a lie about having served in Vietnam. You don't lie about that kind of thing. It dishonours those who endured the horror.

You do not tell this kind of a lie if you are a decent man. You especially do not if you are standing for office.

The second fraudster is Mark Souder, an evangelical congressman of long experience in the state of Indiana, who represents the seat once held by the hapless Dan Quayle.

Mr Souder likes to lecture on morals. His big crusade is promote the idea of sexual abstinence between teenagers in American schools.

He even recorded an online interview about abstinence in which one of his office people, an attractive woman, asked him questions. Trouble is, Souder was having an affair with the very same woman with whom he was discussing, straight-faced, sexual abstinence, as he laid down the law from on high. He is a goner now.

WHAT WAS also most interesting this week was the survey in London's Independent newspaper of the world's wealthiest political leaders.

I do not mind remotely that our Mr Key is worth $50 or so million. We know he made it before politics. We know he made it in a very tough field.

His wealth tells us the man is smart. And we know he is not in politics for the money. And it is not like he is worth obscene billions.

He is simply nicely rich. Any one of us would like to be so nicely rich.

The real surprise for me was Kevin Rudd. Mr Rudd is said to worth $85m. Yet he has only ever been a diplomat and a political bureaucrat, never a businessman.

Well, he had a couple of years at KPMG, the accountants, somewhere along the line but that was all.

I made inquiries. His wealth is matrimonial. His wife, Therese Rein, made the money.

She made it when then Prime Minister John Howard, abolished the Commonwealth Employment Service and outsourced its work to the private sector.

She established and built up an outfit called Therese Rein and Associates, which specialised in getting jobless people, often long-term jobless, back into the workforce.

She built the company into a major international jobs agency with revenues five years ago reaching more than $250m.

She sounds like a remarkable woman in her own right. She is the only wife of an Australian Prime Minister not to take her husband's name.

She is also, I note, the daughter of an Australian Air Force pilot whose spine was damaged in an air crash and who went on to represent Australia as a paralympian. So Kevin is well set up.

It was a shock to see, however, the world's wealthiest ruler is not the Sultan of Brunei, as I had always believed, but the King of Thailand.

He is said to be worth more than $41billion. Once, he would have been able to intervene in those problems in Bangkok, where the urban and rural poor have taken to the barricades demanding new elections.

Something very powerful and very rotten has been at work there. The removal of Mr Thaksin was very weird. Something very bad has gone on to make the opponents of the urban elite and the ruling elite so determined, so angry and so ready for war.

That is what it seems to be. A civil war.