KEY POINTS:
National MP John Carter from Northland has just received the same lesson as Australian Federal Labor MP Belinda Neal has had in the past week - being in public life means just that, even in private.
Carter swore at a police officer issuing him a ticket.
He
denies claims that he tried to make a "citizen's arrest" of the officer.
Belinda Neal was accused of swearing and threatening staff in a restaurant during a row with them over shifting her table.
As a journalist interviewing acting Aussie PM Julia Gillard put it yesterday: "Isn't this just an archetypal vision of the way politicians think they are perhaps more important than the people they represent?"
Carter's misdemeanour seems less serious than Neal's.
Leader John Key plans to talk to him.
And for Carter it has been 13 years between "incidents" - back in 1995 he was sprung as the person behind the voice of "Hone," a dole bludger, in a call to talkbalk host and fellow National MP at the time John Banks.
Carter paid the price by resigning from his job as senior whip The offence was compounded because the incident took Jim Bolger's visit to Washington off the front pages.
Neal got into a row with the staff of the Iguana Waterfront Bar in Gosford, NSW, last Friday night they tried to move the table her party was at for a disco. Statutory declarations have been flourished by just about everybody there to back up the variations in stories. She is married to the NSW Education Minister just to spice things up.
Neal denies she was drunk, that she threatened to have their licence revoked, or that she swore.
Now her aggressive behaviour on the soccer field and suspension from play is in the public arena.
So big a deal is it in Australia that Kevin Rudd took time out of his trip to Japan at present to call Neal to help manage the political fallout. The upshot is that Neal will take "counselling" to help her personal conflicts.
Reading between the lines, she might also find it rather difficult to regain selection at the next election.
Gillard is due here today to lead Australia's delegation to the Leadership Forum in Wellington, a transtasman annual meeting of business and political leaders aimed at advancing the relationship.
John Key will be there too. He could do better for his "talk" with Carter than to borrow Gillard's own response this week: "Whenever people are in the public arena for a private matter, a private dinner or whether they are there for an official event, for all Members of Parliament, whenever we are in public we have got to make sure we are acquitting the standards of behaviour that people would believe are appropriate for Members of the Australian Parliament."
