Mike Moore talking sense

Busier than a one armed paper hanger, busier than a one legged man in a bum kicking competition etc. etc over the last couple of working days but I did manage a few minutes with Auckland's only newspaper this morning.

I was not in New Zealand when you voted for the rather odd brand of MMP under which we now labour (pun intended). It has always struck me that it does not function in the way it was meant to, but I can never quite put my finger on what is wrong. I was also not in the country when Mike Moore was in his pomp but some of his utterances from his office at the WTO over the years have made me think he might not be a bad sort. He writes a short but exceedingly well worded piece this morning on the comments page. It is worth $1.50 (does the paper really cost that much?) to buy the rag just to read it. (The comments page is not free on the web otherwise I would 'cut and paste' it for general perusal). He uses both the Philip Field and Donna Huata cases to argue very strongly that, although NZ likes to think of itself as a first world nation, it is increasingly running itself by third world tribal standards when it comes to affairs of public reponsibility. Oh, he is so right. The lauding of the two named personages by 'their people' when they had palpably behaved apallingly (one went to the slammer for God's sake) is not the way civilised countries should behave. If we are to be judged in the way we would like the rest of the world to judge us both these miscreants should have resigned at the meerest sniff of impropriety - and when they did not we should have insisted that is what they do. Not just bellyache about it but set in motion the mechanism where they had no bloody optioin. We don't have that mechanism or even midset to want it. Very, very bad. He lays some of the blame for this at the door of our particular flavour of MMP but I think this system only exacerbates and facilitates a deeper underlying societal malaise. The way out? Dunno, but changing this lot of parliamentary ratbags for another lot of parliamentary ratbags can't be a bad start - even if this is not really attacking the root of the problem. The longer the incumbents remain in situ the longer they think they are bullet proof and are in place on tenure. Tenure is a very bad thing for work ethic.

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