Last night’s Back Benches appearance was a blast from the past, and not only for me. It was a first time for both Sir Roger Douglas and Michael Cullen, but  Roger was positioned right under his caricature puppet from the days when he transformed New Zealand’s prospects. I doubt whether many there even noticed.

The partisan bawling saddens me, because it encourages in turn a style of bellowing point scoring that leaves a sour taste in the mouth.

A Ministerial staffer observed that only the sorry NZ education establishment could produce an audience so full of ignorami, rude to a leader recognised as one of the best finance ministers in the world in the 20th century, influential far beyond New Zealand. The man who rescued us from a trajectory to the economic status of Uruguay or Argentina was given less courtesy than the man who paid the Aussies a billion dollars for a worthless railway, and produced pre-election accounts that omitted the inconvenient details of ACC’s growing shortfalls.

I’ve admired Cullen’s political skill and intelligence. I thought the Cullen fund was a master-stroke, neatly sequestering $2billion per year of projected surpluses away from the spending eyes of his economically illiterate Cabinet colleagues.

Margaret Wilson and Helen Clark gave him a terrible hand to play when he had to rescue them from their seabed and foreshore debacle. The opening position meant he could only minimise damage, but he did a superb job over a long time, on top of all his other work. The pity is that it was not in defence of property rights, instead of further damaging them.

But last night reminded us of his lack of intellectual integrity. I always found it shocking in the House when such a fine intellect simply made things up .

He would interject with allegations of dishonesty. I suppose he thinks they’re just permissable nonsense. They said more about the gymnastics he had to perform to defend things like the student loan bribe. A man who probably thought he was going to politics to help the workers, ended up channelling taxes to the classes most likely to become privileged.

Last night he knew he was misrepresenting government policy (to allow trading the 4th week of holiday for an extra week’s wages on top of the holiday pay) but did not care. He knows that regulation is among the causes of the US subprime crash and our current depression, but that bad regulation is more to blame than absence of regulation, but demanded more regulation. 

The Labour appointment of Jim Bolger to Kiwibank was a political coup, but at least they could trust Bolger. I wish the same could be said about Michael Cullen, given the rumours that National is thinking of putting him in charge of an SOE.

[My participation in the programme was unplanned. I turned up with Cathy to enjoy the spectacle, with a team from a Young Nats BBQ. Chester Borrows could not leave the House, so I was called from the throng to stand in as an "almost National MP". I was sorely tempted to announce a raft of spontaneous policy.]