Brian Rudman: Old goats need a swift kick

The God's gift to women delusion is hardly a rare phenomenon in parliamentary or legal circles. They're both trades that attract those with the messianic gene. What is disillusioning is that more than a century after Kate Sheppard and her fellow suffragettes won for women the right to vote, and half a century after the radical feminists strutted their stuff, mature women continue to be strung along by these randy old goats.

It's not as though either of the anonymous complainants in the Richard Worth affair was a drunken teenager overwhelmed by events - and a team of super-fit rugby league players. One was a married woman who had stood unsuccessfully for selection as a candidate for Labour Party nomination in last year's election, so presumably knows which way is up. The other was a 45-year old businesswoman who, according to one associate "liked power and wealth" and sought introductions to "political leaders and major businessmen".

Labour leader Phil Goff says the Labour Party member received about 40 text messages and 60 phones calls of a vulgar nature - some of them sexually explicit - between November 26 and February 23.

According to Mr Goff, the woman says Dr Worth met her and offered her a job as an ethnic affairs adviser. After that meeting he called her again and offered her a job as a member of the Lottery Grants Board, but told her she would have to leave the Labour Party and join National.

To me, it's puzzling why a loyal Labour Party member would be engaging in such discussions so soon after an election anyway.

As for the mystery business woman, she has now complained to the police about a sexual encounter that occurred when Dr Worth spent the night in her hotel room - arranged by Dr Worth - during a trip to Wellington.

In both cases, why didn't they give him a swift kick in the goolies, or in the case of the serial texting, send a copy of the messages to his wife - or to the press? We love to spring to the aid of fair damsels.

When the story first erupted, it sounded like another chapter of the television series, Boston Legal. I waited for Dr Worth to plead Denny Crane's defence of "mad cow disease" which is how the William Shatner character tries to excuse his outrageously politically incorrect overtures.

And I waited, also in vain, for the women to stand up for themselves, as they do on Boston Legal, belittling Crane, treating him as a figure of fun, or threatening to sue.

Both actions seem so much more effective than the weeping and wailing we're now getting in the real-life drama.

So was the illegal kidnapping of Auckland University lecturer Mervyn Thompson back in February 1984 by a secret feminist task force for sleeping with a student. He was assaulted and left bound and blindfolded in a local park with the word "rapist" sprayed on his car.

The rights and wrong of this act are still being debated, but one thing is for sure, the incident had the same sort of wake-up impact the scragging of the Engineering School's haka party had had, dampening the ardour of a generation of common room lotharios.

Of course I'm not encouraging any such illegal response now, just suggesting that in both cases, these grown women could have ended the pestering they're now complaining of, at an early stage. This is 21st century New Zealand after all.

As for Prime Minister John Key, having sacked Dr Worth from his ministerial team for undisclosed reasons, why didn't he rapidly walk away from the whole affair? For nearly a week now he's been batting around questions about whether or not Dr Worth should be expelled from the party, removed from the party list for the next election and so forth.

Why is he continuing to remain embroiled in the issue? Labour leader Helen Clark was smart enough, when she was Prime Minister, to leave that sort of dirty business to the party organisation. That's why you have a party machine in moments like this - to keep the prime minister's hands clean and to take the issue off the boil.

After the Dover Samuels sacking, at about the same stage into Ms Clark's prime ministership that Mr Key is now at, she tossed that whole mess across to party president Mike Williams to sort out. She went back to more lofty topics. After a day or two, the pursuing media sleuths tired of the takeaway pies and retreated back home and the immediate furore died down. It's a lesson Mr Key might want to follow.