KEY POINTS:
A poll-driven Prime Minister with an obsession with the 24-hour news cycle and a tendency to take to the television and radio airwaves on any major issue.
Sound familiar? No, don't for one moment even think Helen Clark.
This Prime Minister - hell-bent on getting re-elected - is
merely the subject of a new Australian television satire The Hollowmen.
A PM whose personal political staffers are much more powerful than the public servants they shovel aside in the interests of getting their boss re-elected. A PM whose faceless staffers are never questioned as to why they don't focus on the national interest instead of trying to get their own spin run.
An over-worked Canberra bureaucrat, who sports an impeccable sense of humour, this week emailed me a copy of the first episode .
"I know your guys over there got all steamed up about your Hollow Men at the last election I'm sure you will enjoy this."
The series focuses on a Canberra-based think-tank set up by a Prime Minister whose job is, as one reviewer said, to "anticipate exactly what shit is about to hit the media fan".
There is a serious point of course.
One of the creators said the series was sparked because politics was "run more like a corporation" than the power structures envisioned by Australia's founding fathers in their constitution.
This is a genuine concern, shared by activist Nicky Hager, whose The Hollow Men, based on hundreds of emails Don Brash still contends were stolen from him - helped to put the skids under the former National leader.
But instead of examining whether New Zealand's incumbent Prime Minister also employs such tactics, Hager trots out the line that National's continued employment of Australian political strategy firm Crosby/Textor (just one of the consultants the party has hired) is proof positive that aspiring PM John Key is little more than a political puppet for "foreign" ventriloquists who feed him all his lines.
On Planet Nicky, NZ political journalists are nothing more than ready dupes who unknowingly parrot the lines conjured up by the real power brokers who, ipso facto, must be irredeemably evil.
This is patronising nonsense. In Australia it's long been recognised that political parties of both Labor and Liberal hue resort to what used to be called "machine men" politics.
Another of The Hollowmen's creators said his interest in the behind scenes shenanigans was sparked by going on the campaign trail with former Labor PM Paul Keating in 1996. The television PM was a "little bit" like John Howard (Liberal) and "a lot like" current PM Kevin Rudd (Labor).
Unfortunately, Hager is relatively thin-skinned when challenged over his own activities. He became rather exercised over some excitable comments made by right-wing columnist Matthew Hooten on Kathryn Ryan's radio show last week.
This week Radio NZ ran the following: "We accept Nicky Hager's continued assurances that he did not steal the emails which were published in his book The Hollow Men ... Radio New Zealand apologises to Nicky Hager for comments which asserted the position was otherwise."
But Brash - who came to Hooten's defence - is now asserting the police failed to properly investigate his complaint over the emails theft.
He contends Hager's statement that they came from half a dozen National Party people who had legitimate access to them was in "his strongly held view" absolute rubbish.
Brash's letter, which was copied to Radio NZ chief executive Peter Cavanagh, was worded in strong terms.
He noted that when he was briefed by police about the progress of their investigation into the stolen emails in July 2007 (some nine to 10 months after he lodged a formal complaint about the theft) he was told that they had not at that stage interviewed Hager, or Winston Peters or any of the people that were known to either have or have seen the emails.
Brash remains "extremely irritated" by the police's desultory performance. At issue is their excuse, particularly as they tried to fob him off, that they would not be able to do the interviews in the immediate future "because of Apec".
"With considerable incredulity, I asked what Apec had to do with the inquiry, noting that the Apec meeting was scheduled for Sydney in September. I was advised that the Apec meeting would place considerable demands on New Zealand police resources," his letter said.
"Had Helen Clark's private email correspondence, or that of Helen (sic) Simpson, been stolen and used against the Labour Party, I have little doubt that the police investigation would have been orders of magnitude more energetic than was the case in the situation we are discussing."
The detective inspector leading the investigation was the very same Harry Quinn - now retired - whose credibility was blown when he decided not to throw the book at the PM's chief of staff Heather Simpson - after a previous investigation into claims that Labour had breached spending caps at the 2005 election found a prima facie breach of the Electoral Act on Simpson's part.
Maybe it's time that Planet Nicky came down to earth and investigated the real constitutional issues.
