Hospital pass from prime minister

POLITICIANS relish being quoted, and like to be thought of as knowing their own minds. But if there’s a chance of their being monstered in Parliament about quotes they might now regret having made, the rules are ingeniously perverse – at least, if one is a minister.

It is quite within the rules to affect a total brain outage on the inconvenient quote, and outsource one’s current and retrospective thought processes to another minister.

Thus not for the first time, Prime Minister John Key yesterday refused to answer a question about whether he stood by his remark, made while in Opposition, that he would ‘‘hate to see New Zealanders as tenants in their own country’’. Instead, he used his prerogative under Standing Orders to pass the question to a colleague, Housing Minister Paula Bennett.

Also not for the first time – and dangerously tetchy about it – Speaker David Carter was adamant when the Opposition, as always, objected to swapsies. The rules clearly stated the Government could reassign any question to another minister if it believed he or she was better able to answer it, he said.

In vain did the Opposition make its umpteenth protest that Bennett couldn’t possibly know better than Key what had been in Key’s mind when he made the remark, or what he now thought about it.

Carter said the question, from Opposition leader Andrew Little, also sought information about land sales to foreigners, so Key was quite entitled to defer to Bennett on it.

By all but the arcane logic of Parliament’s Standing Orders, this ruling effectively means that sometimes the prime minister officially believes other ministers know his mind better than he does.

Shooting for the moral high ground, Labour pointed out as a matter of pride – and, it hoped, precedent – that when it was in office, prime minister Helen Clark never once reassigned a question asked of her by the leader of the Opposition.

Government Leader of the House Gerry Brownlee was unimpressed. ‘‘All that proves is that Helen Clark was head and shoulders in competence above everyone else in [that Cabinet].’’

This was just one of the many ways in which customary usage of English undergoes semantical transformation by Speakerly fiat.

The day’s second ‘‘Eh? Wot?’’ moment was when the Government kept insisting Foreign Minister Murray McCully was ‘‘not under investigation’’.

First Key, then Brownlee made this assertion, despite the fact that the auditor-general is investigating the Saudi sheep deal, the chief aspects of which were arranged for, by or at the express and detailed instigation of the minister.

It was hard to process the fine distinction the Government was trying to make, that the ministry and the deal were under investigation, but not the minister whose will was obliged. But Carter managed.

When Greens co-leader James Shaw kicked off the general debate by complaining that McCully should be stood down ‘‘while he is under investigation’’, Carter told him he wasn’t allowed to say that.

Shaw’s co-leader Metiria Turei said this was surely a debating point. But Carter said it was not. ‘‘I have ruled. The minister is not under investigation.’’

McCully will doubtless be hoping the auditor-general, too, accepts the Speaker’s ruling.