I Am Still Alive

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There is a very real possibility that before I get this column completed, the 30-second-attention-span New Zealand news media will have found something else, other than Shane Jones, to go into a state of terminal hysteria over. Something else like an oil company spilling a four-litre can of oil into a remote estuary somewhere so we can have our very own ecological disaster rather than have to use the BP nightmare in the Gulf of Mexico in our news bulletins. If that’s a bit oblique, let me put it this way, New Zealand is a small country where most things that happen don’t make a blip on global radar. So the media hungers after “us-too” stories.

Last year, we followed the revelations in the UK when politician after politician was embarrassed as the amount of their private spending, using public money was released.

That was a really juicy story as it was revealed that, in total, millions of pounds was spent on things like restoring country estates, installing swimming pools and other major items.

The New Zealand news media is largely a lack-lustre, untalented bunch of hacks who have to be led by the nose to a news story and many of them looked on with envy at the goings on in Britain, wishing that we had the scale for such a yarn.

Then they got their big break. There was no scoop involved here, nobody had to do the sort of job that revealed Watergate — the story was delivered by officials, in boxes, to the news media at the same time.

What I am talking about here is the so-called credit card scandal.

Look, the only similarity between what happened in the UK and our “scandal” was that human beings were involved.

To begin with, the so-called New Zealand credit card spending went back to 2003 and involved small change. I think that in every case the politicians involved had long been tapped on the shoulder by the parliamentary accounts team and been told that these items were outside the use of the credit card and that they should pay-up — and they had, long ago.

But never let the facts get in the way of a good story. And the media were as happy as pigs in mud — they rolled in the story, they swallowed it, spat it out again, rolled in it some more, tossed it into the air and rolled in it some more, out of sheer prurient joy.

In the world of private enterprise most people who use a company credit card are allowed to add some private expenses to a transaction if it’s part of a larger amount. For example, you are buying fuel for the company car and use the company credit card, but add a Coke, or a newspaper. Or, if you are Winston Peters, a pack of Benson and Hedges.

Or you are staying in an hotel and pay the bill with the company credit card and you have shouted a mate for dinner.

This is all settled when you present the receipts back at the office and say — “that’s mine, that’s mine — here’s a cheque”.

The difference here is, that parliamentary rules governing the use of credit cards do say, quite categorically, that that’s not allowed to happen. You cannot add personal spending to the payment even if there is an absolutely clear intention of paying it.

So, in that regard, Chris Carter, Shane Jones and the others were guilty of breaking the rules —but in a quite academic and harmless way and the resulting “revelations” were smaller than any storm in a teacup.

The fact that the story dominated the news, led to Jones being called the Minister of Porn and the Minister of Sleaze shows how small and narrow our landscape of genuine news stories is. The behaviour of our media was, largely pathetic. As David Lange once famously remarked, they are a bunch of brain-dead “reef fish”.

As for the sensational tidbit that Jones had watched, gasp, blue movies?

I wonder how many other MPs, in all corners of the house and how many of the hack journalists who created the phrases like Minister of Porn, can put their hands on their hearts and say with total honesty that they have never seen adult entertainment? There was a very large level of hypocrisy at work here.

There is nothing illegal about watching erotic videos or movies. We of the older generations probably still think that there’s something immoral and wrong about it, but younger people have a far, far more accepting view of it. To many younger people, sexual acts between consenting people of the legal age is as natural and a part of daily life as breathing.

I watched, for the first time the other night, an episode of an American sit-com “Two and a Half Men” and I raised an eyebrow over the sexual activity, the bed-hopping and the shedding of clothes that would have earned the show an “after10:30pm” rating a few years ago and an R16 rating a decade before that. In the series — a top-rating one I understand — Charlie Sheen’s character was having nookie with just about the entire female cast. So popular is the series that Sheen — a world champion drinker and wife-beater in real life — is paid a reputed two million dollars for each weekly episode.

Adult movies, like minibars, are available in most international grade hotels in New Zealand — they aren’t there for decoration, they are there because people — mainly blokes I guess — want them. In Europe, making adult movies for hotel channels is one of the largest facets of the entertainment industry. In Europe, if a cabinet minister was reported as having watched adult movies in the privacy of his, or her, hotel room, people would be wondering what the fuss was about.

To me, what Shane Jones was guilty of was stupidity and arrogance — he should know that New Zealanders aren’t as relaxed as people are in other societies about watching adult movies and that, even though he did (eventually) pay for the costs himself that there would be a lot of haw-hawing, tut-tutting along with a beating up and blowing out of all proportion of the story once it broke.

Predictably it was Shane Jones and the adult movies that captured the attention of the nation with the media behaving like giggly schoolboys and schoolgirls, letting serial credit-card rule-breaker Chris Carter off the hook.

I didn’t think there was much in the whole credit-card story except prurient interest. Yes, the letter of the law had been broken in use of the credit cards, even though there appears there was always an intention to pay the private costs, but it didn’t deserve the mass-hysteria that’s swept the nation.

Very much a case of man biting dog.