Dialogue: With a mate like this, who needs enemies?

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

It seems extraordinary to me that there's no parliamentary convention obliging MPs to first of all give to the police any information implying a criminal offence has taken place in the same way any other citizen should.

If the police take no action and any MPs have reason to believe a cover-up has taken place, they should then go to the Minister of Police or the Police Complaints Authority. If they feel the response is still inadequate, then they could reasonably escalate their action and may feel morally obliged to raise the matter in the House of Representatives, especially if it involves another member.

Parliament needs to clarify this issue for the sake of itself and for the sake of the public who can so easily become victims of parliamentary privilege. The names of innocent people may receive incidental unfair publicity.

When Richard Prebble elevated gossip about John Tamihere into a national, public issue, I wondered then why he had not felt obliged to go to the police first. His allegations clearly hinted at criminal activities. Afterwards he made the case that he was simply a conduit, passing on allegations made to him by members of the public, as though that is what MPs should properly do.

The thought that an MP should raise publicly any plausible allegation made to him about others without a serious investigation or without first talking to the police seems to me to be an abuse of parliamentary privilege.

There is also the possibility that the raising of a potentially criminal matter in Parliament, with consequent publicity, could prejudice a police investigation and any subsequent trial. Entirely innocent people may find themselves embroiled in incidental publicity.

I have to be careful what I say here because I am not immune to any legal action by Prebble or any use of parliamentary privilege because he is above the law of defamation and I am not.

I understand the historical and constitutional reasons why MPs have parliamentary privilege, but wonder if the time has come for a constitutional reappraisal, especially when MPs themselves are always the arbiters of what is fair and what is unreasonable by one of their own.

Should the Government not look at whether to match constitutional privileges with constitutional responsibilities, say, giving the Judiciary the power to offer an opinion at least on whether an abuse of responsibility has occurred?

For example, I believe MPs should give up the right to sue for defamation when they have the power of privilege. Some politicians have used government money to sue because they were defamed in office, which seems scandalously irresponsible.

But fat chance of any change. MPs' self-interest has prevailed over any thoughtful examination of the defamation laws and I'm sure they would drown at birth an attempt to have any of their other powers diminished.

I read last week a novel by Booth Tarkington called The Magnificent Ambersons, published in 1918 and a big seller in its day. I was taken with this passage: "Gossip is never fatal until it is denied. Gossip goes on about every human being alive ... and yet almost never does any harm until some defender makes a controversy. Gossip's a nasty thing, but it's sickly, and if people of good intentions will let it entirely alone, it will die 99 times out of the hundred."

Very perceptive, but 82 years on, gossip about celebrities takes wing on the media and flies into everyone's life. Which means that gossip nowadays is often not sickly at all but robust and destructive. So those who traffic in it have a greater responsibility than ever.

In the case of Dover Samuels, Prebble did not raise the issue in Parliament but still, it appears, did not go to the police or advise the complainant to do so. He has expressed no public opinion that he believed the police would not respond in a professional way to the complaint.

After the Tamihere case, I would have thought Prebble would have been even more caring and responsible than necessary about the handling of unproven allegations.

The fact that Helen Clark reacted the way she did to the letter from Prebble about Samuels should remind the Act leader that judgment of one's actions is conditioned by one's previous behaviour. Or, as Shakespeare put it, as usual inimitably: "The nature of bad news infects the teller."

Prebble has long been regarded as a rough and ruthless politician and now has the reputation of being a scandalmonger, someone excessively interested in the frailties of others. I have never liked his style much but when I heard him, during an interview on Morning Report on Thursday, claim more than once that he was a mate of Dover Samuels', I began to despise him.

I hope I'm never unlucky enough to have a mate like that.