Political Diary

Monday
The start of two weeks' recess. Land Information Minister Maurice Williamson takes a break from his iPad to issue a statement on the appointment of two new members to the Cadastral Surveyors Licensing Board. Its job is to license cadastral surveyors who conduct surveys under the Cadastral Survey Act 2002.

The passage of the act was made more famous than was intended when Deputy Alliance Leader Sandra Lee became paralysed with laughter at every mention of the word "cadastral".

Cadastral surveyors are important people and will probably become more so after foreshore and seabed reforms. They survey land titles and work out boundaries.

Felicity Price, of Christchurch, and Marion Miller join the board that monitors the competence of cadastral surveyors.

Wednesday
Vodka shots for lunch at the Youth Parliament? Surely not.

The caterers at Bellamy's go the extra distance for young participants of the annual Youth Parliament, schoolkids who play being serious politicians for a couple of days.

The cooks create special dual-coloured jelly shots - the sort usually laced with vodka and consumed in shot-glasses in night clubs, so we're told. The fact that there were quite a few left over suggests they were not the real thing.

Addressing ways to limit harm from alcohol was one subject of a select committee inquiry by the youth MPs. The committee consensus was they did not want the purchase age raised to 20 - but they did support banning sales in supermarkets and drinking for any driver under 20.

Thursday
What have pizza and Rewi Alley got in common? John Key and Gung Ho.

The Prime Minister leaves Beijing where, besides meeting the Premier and Vice-President, he opens a pizza parlour, the Gung Ho Pizza parlour, owned by two Kiwis.

He flies to the Expo in Shanghai where the first of a five-part documentary series on New Zealander Rewi Alley is screened. It is a collaboration between the Natural History Unit and China's CCTV.

The late Rewi Alley, from Canterbury, was one of the most famous foreign friends of China who coined the phrase "Gung Ho". In the West it has come to mean really enthusiastic; in China it was the name of a work co-operative.

The TV networks here are not so gung ho about the series, however, with no buyers.

Alley died in 1987. Former civil servant Gerald Hensley tells of meeting him in 1973 in Alley's Beijing apartment, where Alley served him tea in a Ming teapot.