Claire Trevett: Age concern conjures up horrors

Look out, Winston - there's another Winnie in town and she's gunning for your votes.

Labour MP Winnie Laban and Green MP Sue Kedgley joined forces to announce an inquiry into aged care which would see them travelling around the nation talking to the elderly.

Kedgley thumped that tub as hard as Winston Peters himself could have done. She started with an eye-popping vow to "lift the petticoats" on aged care - an indignity even Winston wouldn't have subjected them to.

She spoke about the horrors pervading the aged sector, of "completely untrained people just walking off the streets and taking care of our elderly". She said those still living at home were now victim to penny-pinching most foul in home-help - "so now we're expecting our vulnerable elderly to be cleaning their baths and toilets and scrubbing their floors".

She had them toppling over in their droves as they scrubbed their own floors, with the Government paying out far more for hip replacements than it would save through cuts to home-help.

"They won't be able to scrub their floors, they'll end up in hospital and there will be even more social neglect of elderly who stay in their homes."

Kedgley put the final flourish on this vision of Armageddon for the elderly by saying the Government was deliberately lining them up for target practice.

"The elderly are considered to be a vulnerable, elderly and powerless group of people. They're an easy target for the Government."

Winnie Laban then inadvertently ruined Kedgley's soliloquy by saying the two parties would run the inquiry in cahoots with Grey Power - perhaps the most feared jaw-toothed lobby group in the nation precisely because of their ability to complain at high pitch.

The Greens weren't the only minor party thinking about the plight of vulnerable citizens. United Future leader Peter Dunne was worried about another citizen in a precarious position - himself. He delivered his now customary mid-term speech warning the major governing party about the perils of relying on anybody else for support other than himself. Last term, it was a caution to Labour about casting "wandering eyes" in the direction of the extremist Green Party.

This year, he told voters the "dark clouds are already gathering" for a government of 2011. He said Act was "muscle-flexing" and would push a National government to the extreme right in a second term.

He warned that the Maori Party, still basking in the glow of its mana-enhancing love-in with National, would want a lot more "than lip-service and personal warmth". He warned the competing demands of those two parties would tear National asunder.

Dunne had the solution: United Future - "written off as irrelevant and politically moribund now, just as we were in 2002". He proceeded to try to burn his village of 0.9 per cent in order to increase its population, saying he was leaving behind the "fundamentalist mania of a few" which had given the false impression that his party was "just a bunch of religious zealots".

No need to fret about whether he, too, would be scrubbing his own floors in the future, though - he wound up by saying United Future was looking forward to next year with optimism.