Kerre Woodham: What a woman, give her the job

Stephen Wilce. Photo / Natalie Slade

Hi, I'm Kerre and as well as being a talkback host, a newspaper columnist, a writer and a book reviewer, I have the Nobel Prize for Physics, I was a runner-up in the Miss Universe pageant,

I am fluent in six languages and I served on secondment as a Navy SEAL. In fact, the Demi Moore film is loosely based on my life.

I won a bronze medal in the marathon event at the Commonwealth Games and I was awarded the President's Medal by the French president for my humanitarian work in the Middle East.

Really? No. Not really. But I bet there are a few recruitment agencies that would swallow my new-and-improved life hook, line and sinker.

After all, one of the big players in the recruiting field was so wowed by Stephen Wilce's CV that they approved him to be employed by the Defence Force.

It was only after Paula Penfold's expose on 60 Minutes that the Defence Force realised its top scientist was in fact a fantasist. He had never been a member of the British Olympic bobsled team or played for Wales against the All Blacks - these are just a couple of his more preposterous claims.

Now the Defence Force and Momentum Consulting are in dispute about who's to blame for the "bloody embarrassing" blunder, as Chief of Defence Jerry Mateparae called it.

Momentum says it thought Defence would do the referee checks; the Defence bosses quite rightly wonder what the hell they were paying Momentum to do.

In this day of Google, did no one at the recruiting agency think, "Blow me down! What a guy! I wonder what position he played against the All Blacks?" Or what folk group he played guitar for in Britain?

Or what academic papers he's published? Somebody with qualifications this extraordinary should surely excite some interest, shouldn't he?

Maybe we're just too gullible. There have been numerous cases of people falsifying their CVs and getting appointed into top jobs.

Are we just so grateful that such highly qualified people are choosing to come to little old New Zealand that we take their stories at face value? A little more cynicism and a little more time spent Googling might save us from being taken in by a bunch of Reggie Perrins.