By AUDREY YOUNG
You could put a door charge on the Maori affairs select committee at Parliament, and call it family entertainment.
Perhaps with an R rating for potential violence - MPs Richard Prebble and John Tamihere share a confined space for three hours - and for language.
Officials from Te Puni Kokiri (the Ministry of Maori Development) were bluntly told yesterday by National MP Murray McCully that their written answers to questions were "bureaucratic bullshit."
This is no ordinary select committee.
Like others, they meet each week in the general spirit of cross-party sniping, baiting, back-biting, and sneering to scrutinise the serious work of government, in their case Closing the Gaps.
But few committees have such a rich cast of characters, or guests.
Irrepressible Alliance MP Willie Jackson spent the session doing verbal cartwheels every time he secured an affirmative response from a witness that Closing the Gaps originated with the last National Government.
"See, see," he acclaimed.
And Labour MP Joe Hawke was indulged by all sides at frequent intervals with soliloquies about the Parihaka exhibition running in Wellington, ownership of the Treaty of Waitangi and a long tale about an Orakei father of six whose state house rent has been reduced from $300 a week to $85.
"Is that what Closing the Gaps is about?" he asked one of the officials.
"It is part of it," came the desired reply.
But the family flavour prevailed yesterday as the committee continued its scrutiny of what exactly has changed about the Government's flagship programme, Closing the Gaps.
Mr Prebble, the Act leader, put his younger brother Dr Mark Prebble through his paces as a guest witness.
Dr Prebble is head of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.
That the Prebbles were able to speak to each other at all was because others were present, as Dr Prebble explained to the inquisitive Willie Jackson: "The way our own family have handled it is by extraordinary separation in that Richard and I never meet each other in private without someone else there. That's how we've lived our lives for 25 years."
The quizzing of Dr Prebble and his policy director, Dr Mary Anne Thompson, on Closing the Gaps was instructive.
None of the policy's programmes announced in the Budget had changed, they said. But its presentation had, after meetings with the Prime Minister in September and October. And benchmarks to measure progress in education, employment and health should be available within weeks.
Apropos of not much being said at the time, Mr Tamihere sought to remind Dr Prebble that Mr Prebble had "savaged Dover Samuels and his family."
But it was a very civilised grilling compared with the hostile treatment dished out to Labour Department analyst Simon Chapple, whose research, championed by Richard Prebble, challenges the value of social policies directed at Maori.
Mr Tamihere flourished some writings of Mr Chapple's brother, a member of Act, who had written to Mr Tamihere about "'the venomous half Yank Turia"' pushing Marxist Leninist ideology and racial separatism.
The chief executive of Te Puni Kokiri, Ngata Love, described Mr Chapple disparagingly as "a wannabe academic."
Labour MP Mita Ririnui demanded to know where Mr Chapple came from.
Dr Prebble stuck up for him.
"I think that the contribution Simon made was a very interesting contribution to the debate. It was well within the range of things that I would expect and hope an imaginative public service would be producing.
He added pointedly: "Who a public servant's brother is is something which I know many of us in this room would think is not going to get us very far in the discussion."
<i>Cut and thrust:</i> Slurs, sneers, sniping - hey, it's showtime
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