Petty politics

Jane Clifton's column in this week's Listener comments on the current dominance of political news by stories that can only be described as petty, pointing out that

At holiday times, when most MPs dash overseas or try to restore normal relations with the strangers they call their families, the news diet gets especially lean, so mean and petty stories come to the fore.

Clifton focuses on the recent stories about army horoscopes and prison landscaping, but this week's allegations from National that Te Papa is engaging in "political propaganda" because an interactive game about immigrant experiences uses the Labour Party (along with the Plunket Society, Catholic church, and "the regulars at the local pub") as an example of a social group they can join falls squarely into that category. But perhaps the pettiest was on the TV news alst night: Simon Power releasing statistics on the number of traffic accidents in ministerial self-drive cars, and using them to claim that Harry Duynhovem shouldn't be Minister of traffic safety. Duynhoven's car had had three accidents, all of them minor, and he'd been responsible for one of them: he hit a wall at low speed and caused $400 of damage (which is about the price of a single headlight). So, we have National claiming that someone can't be a Minister because they had a parking accident. If that's not petty, I don't know what is...