KEY POINTS:
It was a week of vicious personal attacks in Parliament. Actually, most weeks in the House involve vicious personal attacks but surely the oddest one last week, was the titanic battle of words between Jim Anderton and Heather Mills.
Agriculture Minister Anderton became incensed when the increasingly strange estranged wife of former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney launched an attack on meat and dairy products, claiming they were vandalising the planet and creating an ecological catastrophe.
Admittedly, Mills slightly undermined her case against global warming by driving to Speakers Corner in London's Hyde Park in a petrol-thirsty Mercedes four-wheel-drive and reportedly leaving her motor running throughout her speech and photo opportunity, thus considerably adding to London's carbon footprint.
The vegan Mills was launching a poster campaign for a British animal welfare group that claimed you couldn't be an environmentalist if you ate meat and dairy products. One billboard featured a sweaty Mills lying on parched earth with the slogan "Hey, Meaty you're making me so hot!"
Meaty Jim struck back for Fonterra saying: "The picture on one billboard associating meat and dairy with a burned-out wasteland and hellish fires suggests Ms Mills has never seen a New Zealand dairy farm. For her information, they are lush and green."
I am reasonably sure Jim is right and Heather has never been down the lush green back paddock, milking at dawn and crutching the ducks or whatever they do on farms these days.
However, he assumes most of the planet is congenitally stupid because he is seriously worried she might spur an international boycott of the mountain of dead quadrupeds that provide the foundation of New Zealand's modern economy.
"I don't think Ms Mills is an especially reliable source of credible scientific information," he warned, "but the danger is that some people will take these claims seriously because of her celebrity status. People may think there must be something in it."
No, Jim. People are overwhelmingly aware that Heather Mills is barking mad. At the same event in Hyde Park she suggested an alternative to cow's milk, saying, "There are many other kinds of milk available. Why don't we try drinking rats' milk and dogs' milk?"
I doubt if many of us are about to rush out and buy a rats' milk latte because wacko Heather insists we should give it a try.
What Jim Anderton did achieve with his attack on Mills was a second bout of international news stories sniggering about the poor demented woman, her loopy campaign and New Zealand's Minister of Agriculture's equally crazy defence of carnivores.
Still, Anderton's spat with Heather Mills was positively gentlemanly compared to Trevor Mallard's rabid assault on the reputation of whistleblower Erin Leigh. Mallard displayed the fighting characteristics of a cornered rodent when Leigh went public claiming she quit the Environment Ministry because previous minister David Parker pushed to get Labour Party activist Clare Curran appointed to a PR role there so as to peddle his own political agenda.
He first attacked Leigh for incompetence, referring to work she did on a ministry publication called Gentle Footprints: Boots'n All, putting his own boot in by declaring it "had to be fixed up six times by her after complaints from senior officials ... As a result of that someone had to come in and fix up the mess. Clare Curran was appointed to do that."
He then seemed to further undermine Leigh's reputation, saying: "The last record of contact the ministry had with Erin Leigh was when she came in, in an agitated state, for a quarter of an hour in order to clear out her desk. It is my understanding the last non-physical contact was when she sent an invoice to the ministry for that quarter of an hour."
You can see why Helen Clark was so determined to keep Mallard by her side. No one else in the Labour caucus is capable of getting so down and dirty on the Government's opponents.
Erin Leigh did say she expected to be attacked for opening her mouth about the whole affair but I wonder if she anticipated quite such a nasty clobbering. She may get yet another dose when the State Services Commission reports back on the findings of its inquiry into her allegations. If it decides that David Parker is not guilty of political interference then we can expect her to be further pilloried as little more than a "disgruntled former employee".
That inquiry does raise one further ethical question. How can the State Services Commission investigate Parker when he is the Minister of State Services? David Parker is the minister responsible for the public servants investigating charges that he politically interferes with the public service?
Even Mills would find that crazy.
