Jim Hopkins: If you make the rules, play by the rules

Prime Minister John Key talks with Paul Henry on Breakfast. Photo / Supplied.

It's not easy being a government. Indeed not, friends and neighbours, fellow New Zealanders of every shade and hue.

We common yobs may think governments enjoy a glamorous, go-go, jet-set life, chock full of credit cards, state dinners and the heady thrill of hanging out with hot dudes like the Auditor-General, the Chief Justice and the Deputy Senior Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages.

But there's more to it than that. We may dream of going to Parliament and bringing the House to its feet with a wild and passionate speech during the Third Reading of The Dargaville (and Districts) Anti-clockwise Rotations Amendment Bill.

But our dreams are as dust. For such excitements are merely a part of the whole and the rest, alas, is a deal less thrilling.

It's not all beer and skittles being a government, nor jeer and spittle neither. Most of the time you have to be all po-faced and proper, prudent and prim and much given to circumspection.

Because, when you set the standards, you have to maintain them. Which is why it's considered infra-dig to stage a love-in during Question Time or put LSD in the Opposition's tea.

And why, unless you're the Caligula Party, you don't normally appoint a horse as Trade Ambassador to Gondwanaland. Them as makes the rules has to play the game. That's that and there you have it.

Every would-be Caesar should be, like Caesar's wife, above suspicion - in every statutory respect.

Thus, if a government believes it would be a spiffing idea to have the commoners - gippos and weirdos and gibberers too - sing a bilingual anthem, then it needs to know the words.

If it chooses to restrict the amount of alcohol motorists may consume, it must tell its chauffeurs, "Lips that touch liquor shall never drive mine!" And if it enacts laws imposing the strictest food safety standards on manufacturers, then it can't advertise the fine products produced in The People's State Nut Chutney factory with the slogan "A Mouse in Every Can".

The hoi polloi won't like that. They'll get quite hoity-toity and accuse their government of double standards. The ruled want the rules to apply to the rulers. And when they don't, we peasants are inclined to get angry and shout, "Hey, boofheads, are we going to choose a government that looks and sounds like a government next time? You bet we will, and don't you forget it!"

No government in its right mind (assuming that's not an oxymoron) would ignore such indignation, whether its focus was nut chutney or television - hard as it is to distinguish between them. We don't think governments - or their employees - should play fast and loose with the expectations they have of us.

So when the suspended voice of The People's Choice inquired if future Governors- General would be "more like a New Zealander", there was much fizzing at the bung.

All manner of pundits quickly queued to register their disapproval, most focused on the utterer. But the issue is institutional - as is the use of five-year-old footage to sustain a shonky story about Palmerston North being the worst city in the country (a breech that's seen no reporter fired or editor resign, incidentally).

Both are examples of a government agency, albeit an SOE, playing a game that governments simply shouldn't play.

Governments shouldn't be in the ratings game - not on television anyway. If they want to run a television station, it should be an opinion leader, not a ratings leader.

Its brief should be to make sense, not money. It should provide what others do not. Its dividend should be social, not commercial.

Except it isn't. Our public broadcasting arrangements are totally schizophrenic. The government's radio station is non-commercial, worthy, high-minded and much loved by the chardonnay socialists in university common rooms.

But its television stations are hell-bent on being the biggest grizzlies in the bear pit, happy to serve up prole fodder at every opportunity. Every morning, Paul Henry outrages some and amuses others. Every night, Shortland Street explores themes that erode innocence and steal childhood.

And so it will stay till we resolve the conflict between content and cash. "How dare he say that?" Simple. He dares because it rates.

That's how it is and will be until the government sells (or leases) TV2 and uses the proceeds to operate TV1 as a non-commercial station.

You can't be a player and the ref as well. By all means have the government set the standards - and make them tougher too, if they choose. Broadcasters should be held to account.

The market should be monitored. Dodgy news should come with a government health warning. But it's difficult to insist on clear labels when you're dishing up the dirt.

Not for nothing did the BBC's first Director-General, Lord Reith, require his radio announcers to wear dinner suits while reading the nightly Epilogue. Po-faced it may have been, and prim and proper too, the very essence of probity - but that's precisely how you're meant to behave when you're a government.