Terry Sarten: For takeoff, please fasten dancing shoes

NOT ENOUGH SEATS: Musical chairs may be a better alternative to dragging passengers off planes. PHOTO/AP

More stories of passengers being hauled off planes are now emerging as the small matter of overbooking hits the headlines.

The whole thing seems an odd mix of greed and poor service.

Apparently people don't always show for their flight, so airlines sell extra seats to ensure they are maximising profits. Customers are then paying for their seat on a gamble that they may get turfed off a flight if, on departure, there are too many passengers.

There are clearly better ways of doing this than dragging hapless passengers out of their seats and down the aisle while being filmed by horrified onlookers.

Instead they could turn it into a game - and musical chairs is the obvious one.

Everyone, including company staff transferring to another airport, are on their feet and moving about till the music suddenly stops. They then dive for the nearest seat. Those left standing have to leave the flight without protest.

Of course, children, being smaller, quicker and more experienced players, will get the best seats while the adults stagger around in the aisle.

Those that make a beeline for the pilot's seat would lose their luggage allowance as that would be cheating because who would want their plane to be flown by some unqualified person such as the chief executive of a major company who does not know how to say sorry?

Another way to tackle seat allocation would be to incorporate this into the the pre-flight safety briefing dance.

The crew would point out the emergency exits and then signal the start of the seat scramble, waving their arms to police the flow, using a whistle to indicate penalties (sending people's luggage to another country would be a good penalty for things like cheating, pushing old people, shoving small children aside or high tackles on rugby players).

Chester Borrows has inadvertently done an amazing thing as he winds up his career in politics - he has demonstrated why party politics undermines democracy.

His statement that building more prisons is not reducing reoffending was worth making but we should note with concern that he spoke his mind on this issue - challenging the National Party line - only now as he heads to retirement from Parliament.

Does this mean we have to wait until our MPs retire to find out what they really think? Chester has just illustrated why we should move away from party politics and elect independent candidates who stand by their own values rather than those of party apparatchik.

On that note, it is worth adding that if Winston Peters really does think the ethnicity of a journalist means they will be biased, then the man is an idiot.

The problem is that surely Winston is not that silly. If he does not believe what he is saying but does so to get attention, then in a perverse way that is somehow worse than if he fervently believed we are being overrun by Asian immigrants. This would make him not just a bigot but also an alternative factoid.

-Terry Sarten (aka Tel) is a writer, musician and satirista - feedback: tgs@inspire.net.nz