John Roughan: Politics puts a knife in the back of humour

In a few weeks we will be into the phase that everyone in newspapers calls the silly season, a period when even politics takes a holiday and pages have to be filled with real people acting as real people do.

The pleasures and problems of real life are supposedly less compelling than the highly charged concerns of politics, but I often wonder.

Imagine if somebody complained in the middle of summer that a Labour MP had an odd way with tennis balls when he was a schoolteacher 20 years ago? Or chose the silly season to treat a plainly jocular email note from a National MP as a threat? We'd suggest they get a life.

The real silly season is with us right now.

It is the fag end of the year, when weariness sets in, patience frays, and common sense gives way to tired ill-judgment, which is most visible in Parliament.

Take the tennis ball nonsense.

I was away in May when poor David Benson-Pope was accused of taping a pupil's hands to his desk and stuffing a ball in his mouth. By the time I heard it, the story had become a political scandal that helped to turn the polls against the Government for the first time in five years.

If he hadn't denied it, I suppose a sense of proportion could have been preserved. Everybody who was at school 30 or 40 years ago knows of a boyish teacher capable of going off his nut in a fairly harmless way. I can recall chalk and dusters being hurled at inattentive classmates.

I dare say that would put professional registration at risk these days, but I doubt the culture had changed that much by 1982 when Benson-Pope made a memorable impact on at least some of the pupils of Bayfield High School in Dunedin.

I will never know how something so trivial became a police investigation. But the file now released by the police with their decision not to prosecute deserves to be preserved in the annals of political absurdity.

Complete with handwritten witness statements and a sketch of the classroom, the file records in ponderous plod-speak that Benson-Pope used to hit inattentive pupils on the head with an object that had a tennis ball stuck on the end and was called a bonker.

An extract from the police notes:

"Philip Lindsay Weaver was in Benson-Pope's 4th Form Social Studies class in 1983. Does not describe himself as a troublemaker but was a talker. Recalls he was talking in class and it was not too long after the start of class Benson-Pope hit him on the head with his bonker.

"Then Benson-Pope pushed the tennis ball taken from his bonker into his mouth. Weaver took the ball out because it was uncomfortable. Benson Pope pushed the ball back into his mouth, which required his mouth to be wide open and quite painful to the jaw, and taped his hands to the corner of the desk using duct tape.

"At the end of the period Benson-Pope un-taped him and Weaver removed the tennis ball himself. States he would have tried to free his hands if he could but the tape was quite strong ... "

Why in the name of reason were self-respecting police officers asked to do this? How much has it cost in police and parliamentary time?

Even Benson-Pope's parliamentary accusers, National lawyer Judith Collins and Act leader Rodney Hide, a teacher once, probably believe privately that the whole thing happened in that exaggerated semi-jest that can strike a chord with teenage boys.

But Collins and Hide had to play the political game and Benson-Pope's May denial was, if false, a misdemeanour the House would have to treat seriously.

Parliament may be an unreal place but question time on Tuesday was good television.

Confronted with the police finding of a prima facie case, a tick in the Benson-Pope cheek grew visibly more convulsive.

He retreated from the outright denial of May to a newly prepared position that he did not remember the incident and did not believe it had happened.

Then his interrogators dropped the ball. They didn't ask the one question he probably feared: since the Minister now says he cannot remember the incident and doubts that it happened, how was he able to tell the House on May 12, "I find such allegations ridiculous, and I refute them"?

Refute v. 1. prove (a statement or the person advancing it) to be wrong. 2. deny (a statement or accusation). The Concise Oxford Dictionary, Tenth Edition Revised, 2001.

It is not what men do that is their downfall but what they deny.

Still, it's hard to know which was more ridiculous this week: Benson-Pope's stone-walling or the abject apology from a new National MP, Allan Peachey, for a bit of harmless email horseplay.

Again it was an "offence" that nobody outside politics would take seriously.

Peachey, previously head of Rangitoto College, is an educational conservative. Selwyn College, in his Tamaki electorate, is about as liberal as they get.

Declining an invitation to address the college's prize-giving, he added, "P.S. Yes, I do have a knife in your back, so be careful."

Common sense says he could not resist a ribald comment to philosophical opponents in his old profession, the sort of people he knew. How wrong he was.

When a Selwyn co-principal, Carol White, took it as a serious threat, Peachey apologised.

The next day the Post Primary Teachers Association president Debbie Te Whaiti said the apology did not go far enough.

"It is unacceptable for a politician to threaten a public servant," she said. "It is also representative of the kind of bullying behaviour that educators are striving to eliminate in our schools."

Are these people for real? I don't believe so. Liberal teachers are the foot soldiers of the Labour Party and the PPTA peddles more politics than other professional associations consider seemly.

(Let me here record the PPTA's denial to save it penning a reply too long and tedious to serve to paying readers.)

In any event, Peachey, having watched Benson-Pope writhe, then stood in Parliament and made a statement so contrite you'd have thought he had been caught with the knife.

What is wrong with our public life that we have so few people big enough to laugh at themselves and at anyone who takes these things too seriously?

To make light of anything these days is a little dangerous. But after every summer break even Parliament seems to reconvene with a new sense of proportion that lasts for a week, sometimes two. The silly season is a reality check we need.