Paul Little: Government should tackle bigger issues than blasphemy

Was Judith Collins being disingenuous when she said Labour had nine years in Opposition to come up with solutions to the housing crisis?

The Government has introduced the Crimes (Offence of Blasphemous Libel) Amendment Bill, which will drive the offence of blasphemy out of the temple of our judicial system.

One might quibble with the timing of this announcement, so close to Easter, Passover and Rama's birthday (which is celebrated today, by the way).

However, it probably had to be done. For too long have frivolous charges of blasphemy been allowed to clog up the courts, pre-occupying our finest legal minds and causing justice to be delayed where it matters.

However, there are many other laws that need reform and revision. Some of them, arguably, more important.

So, finding time to deal with blasphemy seems indicative of the Government's predilection for sweating the small stuff while tiptoeing around larger issues.

This announcement might not have seemed so ridiculous had it not come in the week that some busybodies with calculators at Radio New Zealand worked out that in the past five months the Government has announced a "review, a working group, an advisory group, or an investigation" every four days on average.

It beats working.

I mentioned a couple of columns back that the Government has been slow to match action to feel-good rhetoric.

I hadn't realised their prevarication strategies would be so old fashioned. Locking difficult decisions away in committees is a tactic as old as politics itself.

Although the same cannot be said about deciding what constitutes blasphemy.

Exactly what early Christians believed was pinned down in the Nicene Creed, whose wording was agreed upon in 325AD after a convocation lasting just three weeks.

So when Judith Collins said recently – in phrasing that was much less stabby than we've recently come to expect - that the Government had had nine years in opposition to come up with solutions to the housing crisis, she had a point.

However, she was also being disingenuous because under her party's administration the housing crisis had metastasised so quickly and in so many directions that it would have been impossible for anyone to devise new solutions quickly enough to keep up.

Predictably and sadly, commentators of the so-called left who spent nine years criticising National for inaction over our most serious problems are now praising their pet Government for exercising caution in deciding what to do about these same matters.

In this version of the story, Labour have not had their hands on the levers of power for long enough and are still learning how to use them. Maybe. Or they could just ask Winston - he knows how things work around here.

In fact, Labour, with its revolving-door cast of querulous seat warmers, helped National survive for nine calamitous years simply by being so disorganised and ineffective in opposition that they had no claim to credibility.

And now, instead of making decisions and launching programmes, they are pausing to ask even more questions.

When will we see some action? It's a reasonable question. Perhaps someone in the Greens could ask someone in National to ask someone in Labour.

Regular readers of this column – and I'm sure there are a couple of you – may recall that in early March I relayed the sad tale of the inner-city resident whose efforts to do his census duty were thwarted because the street numbering of his address had been changed by an unseen hand to the extent that Statistics New Zealand could not find him in order to deliver his access codes.

Repeated calls to the Helpline had proved fruitless. However, you will be relieved to know that all ended well and, on the day after the census was held, he received three access codes in his mail box.