Kerre Woodham: MP's tantrum childish

Charles Chauvel. Photo / Supplied

I have absolutely no sympathy for MP Charles Chauvel's mutterings about his taxpayer-funded flight being disturbed by the grizzling of a couple of kids.

So the kids squealed a couple of times. So their dad might have had a political agenda in pointing out what an unpleasant fellow traveller Chauvel was.

Get over it, Charles.

Families have to get from A to B; generally, they're fare-paying passengers (unlike MPs) and it was only a 50-minute flight. Hardly the voyage of the damned from Auckland to Heathrow.

I don't subscribe to the school of thought that says gay people like Chauvel have no right to comment on children, as some of the more extreme commentators would have it.

There are very many gay parents and even more excellent gay aunts and uncles who have a great deal to do with kids and every right to comment on issues of parenting.

But irascible sods are irascible sods, be they gay, straight, male or female.

I do have every sympathy for the poor people who paid good money to go along to hear Buzz Aldrin speak at SkyCity last week only to have to endure a baby squawking throughout the speech.

Hearing an astronaut would be one of those once-in-a-lifetime kind of events. His every word would have been pure gold.

But the couple who insisted on taking their baby seemed more interested in hearing their baby stretch its lungs than anything Aldrin might have had to say.

They had to be told to take the baby out of the auditorium and there were a number of messages to the Sideswipe column in the Herald complaining about the selfishness of the parents.

Quite right, I thought, as I read the column over my muesli and moved on.

But I was stunned to read a response from Diana a few days later.

She identified herself as the child's mother and went on to complain about how embarrassed she felt about having to leave the theatre and that babies made noises and people should get over it and, really, people today simply had no patience.

Her breathtaking arrogance and her automatic assumption that hundreds of people should be inconvenienced because she was incapable and/or unwilling to find someone to mind the child for an hour is staggering.

Nobody is suggesting that parents should become hostages in their own homes until their children are socialised and civilised enough to behave in public.

Hang on. Maybe I am.

But the idea that your baby should accompany you everywhere is ridiculous. Movie theatres, conferences, ballets, plays and most restaurants after 8pm are for adults, unless otherwise specified.

You might think your womb has produced the most staggeringly gifted child that the world has ever seen; other people see a poxy, noisy, over-indulged brat who's ruining their experience.

As Shakespeare tells us (or would, if the actors could be heard above the mewling infants brought along to the theatre by their idiotic parents): "The baby beats the nurse and quite athwart goes all decorum."