Scandalous Proportions

A policy shift towards China trumps the Health Minister’s holiday.

- Jane Clifton

We’re no longer, if we ever were, quite the innocent backwater The Clive James Show used to make fun of on 1980s TV, where the theft of an elderly Ford Escort (beige, manual) was considered national news.

But sometimes the political issues we get our knickers in a twist about, compared with the threshold for scandal in other countries, makes the nicked motor seem smoking-hot news.

When we recently clutched our chops in horror at National’s Nicky Wagner calling Labour’s Deborah Russell a bitch in Parliament, a colleague sent me a clip from a recent debate on Australian telly. One politico began by telling another he was “even more stew-pid than yew look”, and went on to accuse him of taking money from a known crook. The other politico replied indignantly that he had stopped taking money from the crook. “I only took money from ‘ees brother!” To a further goading about money-laundering via a welding business that employed the politico’s wife, he further protested, “I never had a Sweeess bank account. That’s been prew-ven!”

Without knowing anything about either politician’s background, the viewer could conclude that one was bloody rude and considered himself immune from defamation, and the other had been investigated by authorities about the location of certain illicit monies – and that from the unflinching demeanour of the debate’s host, this was just A’strayn poleeteecal bees-ness as ew-sual.

Back in New Zealand, Health Minister David Clark stood accused of … taking his family on holiday. Not with money bunged through the books of a dodgy panel beater or Panamanian trust; or even with that common accessory of the scandalising foreign politician, an illegal immigrant au pair.

Hell, it was even with his own wife and his own children, so less than zero on the Barnaby Joyce scandal index.