Paul Little: Stupidity oils wheels of society

Blue hair, tattoos and piercings will limit your employment options.

The brief of this column is to write about events that have been in the news during the week. But that's not really what it's about at all. It's about stupidity - a reliable source of material as there is so much of it about.

Stupidity seems to be the oil that keeps the wheels of society running smoothly - it drives our politics, media and education systems.

Downstream, thousands of people are employed to clean up the chaos created by stupidity. It is excused in the elderly, tolerated in the mature and assumed in the young. Although at one extreme every day brings technological developments that only a genius could conceive and execute, the sheer volume and prevalence of stupidity at the other extreme easily outweighs it. We are living in what will be looked back upon as a Golden Age of Dumb.

And as long as there are people doing things as breathtakingly, jaw-droppingly, eye-poppingly stupid as holding drugs in Bali, then we know that the torch of stupidity will continue to burn brightly.

That is a country whose own - very stupid - laws feature notoriously severe penalties for drug offences. It apparently needs to have at least one Australian woman in custody on drugs offences at any time. If there was one place in the world where you would expect the dimmest knucklehead not to put themselves in this position, it is Bali.

If Leeza Ormsby, aka Morrison, was indeed in possession of methamphetamine, ecstasy and marijuana on the island paradise, as is alleged, then the future of stupidity is in good hands.

Someone called Maya Croll-Wright got herself into the news the other day because she has blue hair and tattoos and is overweight - her description.

This, she complained, is the reason no one will employ her in the hospitality industry. That and the whinging, entitled attitude, probably. This conundrum is increasingly common, what with the growing amount of blue hair and number of tattoos around. (You once had to be over 70 to have blue hair, but I digress.)

Although her weight may or may not be her personal responsibility, the tatts and dye job definitely are. The point overlooked by Croll-Wright - and others who would like us to admire the number and intricacy of their body decorations, including but not limited to tatts and piercings - is that certain choices, which people are entirely free to make, will inevitably restrict their options.

Unless they are even more than usually dim, they will know at the time they get the tattoos and the blue hair that many people will not employ them. By going ahead and making that choice they accept the limits they are imposing on themselves.

Whatever ham-fisted skulduggery the Labour Party was involved in at TVNZ's Maori and Pacific unit - competent skulduggery clearly not being a significant part of Labour's skill set - it would be a shame if the attendant ruckus drew attention from several important issues concerning politics and media bias.

The first is that all politicians see criticism - or any questioning slightly tougher than jolly, nodding agreement - as bias. The next is that where a broadcaster's political leanings - usually as firm as jelly in a desert during a windstorm - are known, then viewers are able to work out for themselves where that particular person is coming from in their questioning.

This is why Paul Henry, a former National Party candidate, is able to host a nightly news show on TV3.

Journalists should always take a side. It's called the "other side".