Under National Party rules I could not make public statements  during the selection period. The purpose is to avoid Clinton/Obama style fraticide (though voters generally benefit from that searching exposure even if the Democrats do not in the short term).

I could maintain this blog’s posts during that period on condition they did not mention the selection process or attract MSM attention.  Statements as Wellington Rugby League chairman were also permitted.

The gag chafed. I avoided Kiwiblog to reduce the urge to comment. Catching up now, I wish I’d participated in some of the conversations on my selection. I’m grateful to the decent people who injected  fact into comment strings, but I could have linked to the Hansard reports of debates to counter others’ dishonest or ignorant meta references. 

The distortion of my position on the Prostitution Reform Bill is typical. I ended up chairing the Select Committee on it. We soon found that prostitution has not been a crime in New Zealand for over 100 years. Only pimping and brothel keeping were crimes. The Bill was therefore largely a linked set of dishonest slogans. It created more vague new crimes than it eliminated, and removed defences that are fundamental to our notions of guilt and innocence (for example with strict liability  for  publishing an ad for a prostitute under 18, knowingly or unknowingly). Police of course now do not enforce much of the new law.

The Bill served its political purpose. Proponents were badged as social liberals. Opponents as conservative.

I voted against the Bill because it was simply bad law, with provisions designed not to be enforceable. Many speeches in support were deeply dishonest, especially about child prostitution. What’s happened since bears out my fears.  

Through-out my time in Parliament I tried to debate what bills actually did as rules, in contrast to their symbolic status as badging passwords of tribal membership. I found that few MPs read the law they were debating, so most debates centred on the claims in introductory summaries and purpose clauses. They are commonly deceitful (to sample Orwellian current practice try the purpose section of the EFA).  

I will be pilloried for failing to shout the right password at these tribal challenges. I was debating the effect of words in the bills. The others were proclaiming their own moral virtue.

A civil union example illustrates the point. Many years earlier a prominent National MP sought my views on the Homosexual Law Reform Bill. In response I developed notes based on Lady Wolfenden’s famous summary “the law has no place in the bedrooms of the nation”. The MP used the notes almost verbatim in supporting the Bill.

So I started without prejdice against Tim Barnett’s Civil Union Bill. I like him and worked constructively (as deputy chair to him)  on the many bills that came to our committee.

By the end I could not vote for the bills. We had tearful submission after submission on the need to pass the bill to end the practice of hospitals refusing deathbed access to partners because they were not married. Georgina Beyer’s speech picked up the theme and tore the heart strings. Only problem was that as far as officials could find out there was no such current practice, and certainly there was nothing in any law about it, and neither the Marriage Act nor the Civil Union Act touch on it then or now.

On the other side we had hundreds of submissions from religious people essentially complaining about the state’s gutting of the legal meaning of marriage. That was not in the bills before us. That occurred 30 years earlier, without significant protest from established religion. 

But the civil union bills did complete Margaret Wilson’s conversion of de facto status to a form of non-consensual (but devalued) marriage partnership.

Probably 4 out of the 600 submissioners we heard had read the bills well enough to pick up what was actually being done in the nearly 100 statutes that the civil union companion bill amended.

I unwisely complained at a Waikato University meeting one day about having to endure days of grumpy christians and whining gays. I regret the rudeness, but not the sentiment. Our committee room was set up by the government as a theatre for their long-running tribal battle.  But the submissions on both sides had next to nothing to do with the law we were passing.

I eventually voted against the civil union bills for many faults including because of what they did to people who did not even know they were in the firing line – deliberately unmarried and non “united” partners. 

My directness ignites the politically correct.  In Parliament I stuck to exploring issues bluntly as a personal defense against being infected by the fog of spin and hypocrisy in which most political debate is conducted.

Of course there’s a price.  Political speech is calculated and cowardly for good reason. Vivid phrases will be plucked from their context and retailed to oohs and aahs of simulated distress. Specially valuable for this purpose are phrases crystallising opinions specially demonised to distinguish superior consciousness from that of ordinary people.

I trust that enough Wellingtonians will want to see that hard work in Parliament again even if they don’t always agree with me. I think enough want genuine compassion. I look at the effect laws have in reality on the people they pretend to protect. Many people working in policy and implementation tell me they want me back, to puncture pompous political speech balloons they’re being forced to write. They want me to stand for law that means exactly what it says.

Many genuine Wellington liberals (not collectivists who’ve stolen liberal clothing) are also keen for someone they can trust to look behind the spin, and then not use it in talking to them. I will not  treat Wellingtonians as children to be humoured with PC euphemisms.

We’ll know how many by the end of the year.