Garth George: A nation is quick to judge petty mistakes

Chris Carter. Photo / Mark Mitchell

The first thing that gets me about the latest disclosures of ministerial misuse of credit cards is the absolute stupidity of those ministers' actions.

For years now there has been a growing emphasis in Parliament and the bureaucracy on things they call "transparency" and "accountability".

At the same time there has been a revolution in the media, a transfer of emphasis from serious and objective reporting to an obsession with the sick, the sad, the salacious and the sensational.

Yet the ministers involved continued to charge to their ministerial credit cards items that could not be justified as work-related expenses. Did they do it because they didn't want their wives or partners to know what they were spending money on, or were they convinced in their own tiny minds that they were entitled to such perks?

Whatever the reason, they must be as thick as two short planks to think they could get away with it.

That applies particularly to Chris Carter, who has been playing the "they're getting at me because I'm gay" card ever since he entered Parliament and who as a minister was the biggest of big spenders. Is that, and his pointed refusal to acknowledge any wrongdoing, let alone apologise, until threatened with the sack by his leader, also because he is homosexual?

The second thing that gets me is the utter triviality of the sums involved - a few dollars here, a few hundred there.

Compared with the hundreds of millions conned from investors by the operators of numerous collapsed finance companies, and the huge rorts perpetrated by ministers and parliamentarians at Westminster, our ministers' malfeasance, if it was even that, is peanuts.

Surely their credit card spending should be between them and Ministerial Services, whose task it is to oversee such spending and to deal with any breaches.

In most cases the illegitimate spending was promptly (or belatedly) reimbursed, and if any arbitration were required it should have been referred to the Speaker for a ruling - and that's where these matters should have rested.

So the third thing that gets me is the blatant invasion of privacy contained in Ministerial Services providing thousands of credit card documents going back seven years to the media; and in the revealing of further details apparently by the providers of goods and services. If there were ever a case for the Privacy Commissioner to look into, then this would be it.

The fourth thing that gets me is the pettiness and hypocrisy contained in the loud and pharisaic condemnation emanating from the media and the public and the silly overreaction of the political parties.

Sure, this newspaper's seven deadly sins graphic on the front page last Friday was a brilliant piece of journalism, worthy of London's raciest tabloids.

And, as one of our local priests, Father Mark Field, pointed out in his homily at mass on Sunday as he waved Friday's front page from the pulpit, at least the word "sin" got a play for a change - a rare occurrence indeed.

But Father Field, preaching from the day's Gospel (Luke 7:36-50), observed that the Lord Jesus would have been the last person to have condemned any sinner, that we are all sinners and that it ill behoves any of us to condemn others.

He is right. In one of the most comprehensive of Jesus' teaching sessions recorded in Matthew's Gospel, the Lord said: "Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.

"Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye', when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite. First take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye."

In a letter to the editor headed "MPs' indiscretions" published on the opposite page on Tuesday, Boris Sokratov, of Mt Eden, put that succinctly for me in today's context.

"Sadly," he wrote, "as a nation there is something deeply amiss in our psyche - the speed with which we move to apportion blame to others, our penchant for punishment, and our unwillingness to forgive."

Why on earth we should expect immaculate standards from a bunch of politicians is quite beyond me. If you've listened to or watched Question Time, for instance, in Parliament you must know that you might as well demand immaculate standards from a class of unruly primary school kids.

This whole business is so ridiculous it is hilarious. And it says a lot more about political one-upmanship and the sorry state of our society than it does about the ministers in the firing line.