John Armstrong: Day of eulogies and tedium

Former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, left, with his wife Tamie. Photo / AP

Praise the Lord and please pass the smartphone pronto. With time set aside for fulsome tributes to the recently deceased Malcolm Fraser and Lee Kuan Yew followed by daily question-time to Cabinet ministers followed by the thrill of debating the uncontroversial, unremarkable Statutes Amendment Bill, it was always going to be a long, slow afternoon in Parliament yesterday.

While the rest of the nation was hanging on every ball bowled at Eden Park, the House was consumed with such earth-shattering matters as whether to replace the words "response times" in the Fire Service Act with the words "achieving timely responses to fires".

Deprived of a television, Parliament's cricket fanatics were forced to squint at their cellphones and other mobile devices with which they had sensibly armed themselves before coming down to the chamber.

There was no escaping the tedium. The only MP who came even close was New Zealand First's Denis O'Rourke who was nearly ejected from the chamber by Speaker David Carter.

Then the latter realised that throwing O'Rourke out might not actually be a punishment, given what was happening elsewhere.

By then, the House had been treated to a lengthy eulogy to Fraser, the former Australian Premier, delivered by Tracey Martin, New Zealand First's deputy leader. Her four-minute oration did not impress Peter Dunne who appeared to accuse her of pilfering chunks of Wikipedia.

Martin, however, steered dangerously close to creating trouble for herself without any help.

She observed that the deaths of Fraser and Lee, the founding father of modern-day Singapore, appeared to mark "the end of the generation of Western leaders of the 1970s".

It was too good an opportunity for National MPs to let slip, with some pondering aloud as to whether she was including her own leader, who began his political career in the 1970s, in that category.

When the House paid separate tribute to Lee, Martin was suitably deferential, lamenting the absence of one of Lee's fans - the "Right Honourable Winston Peters", who was campaigning in the Northland byelection.

It turned out Peters was not the only admirer of Lee. That label was shared by Phil Goff's mother of all people. Back in 1977 during his student days, Goff had landed in Singapore and been given a haircut by Customs officials as a condition of entry to the island state.

"My mother congratulated him [Lee] on achieving something that nobody else had been able to do," Goff told the House. Indeed, the Singaporean short back and sides was the first time in six years that Goff's flowing locks had been confronted by scissors or razor.

It was mildly interesting. But minds were elsewhere contemplating a different kind of cut.