Barry Soper: Easy for new Government to blame the last

It's easy for a new Government to go on blaming the last one for most of the difficulties they face when they take office.

They all do it.

Jacinda Ardern was recently asked how long can you go on blaming the last lot and she said about a year.

But there are some fingers that are pointed quite legitimately and a couple of them have come up over the past couple of weeks.

The finger pointing at National for doing nothing during its whole time in office about what was obviously a sham industry being built up around the methamphetamine contamination of houses is entirely legitimate.

They sat on their fingers even though everyone around them was saying the Health Ministry guidelines for a risk being posed was set ridiculously low.

Banknotes were found to have a way higher contamination than any house testing positive under the guidelines.

They allowed around a hundred million dollars to be spent cleaning up state houses and blacklisting tenants who lived in the positive hovels, even though there was little if any proof that they were personally responsible.

Even Bill English was acknowledging the bar was set too low and P residue left under it posed little threat to health, he admitted, and yet National did nothing.

The best English could say was that he hoped scientists could come up with new guidelines which they never did.

It took the good sense of the current Housing Minister Phil Twyford to call in the Prime Minister's chief scientific advisor Peter Gluckman, ironically appointed by John Key, to have a look at the problem which he found doesn't exist.

Now The Greens are looking at compo for state house tenants who got the heave ho from their "contaminated" houses which Housing NZ is now looking at.

Yeah well if they get compo, what about home owners and landlords who've needlessly ripped their houses apart, as the money flowed in for the P eradicators, some of whom got their expertise off the Internet?

But then again Labour seems to have a crooked finger when it came to setting up its Fair Pay Agreement taskforce a couple of days ago with the appointment of former National Prime Minister Jim Bolger to lead the unions back to the promised land.

Bolger's Government, with the Employment Contracts Act, in the early 90s did more than any other to pull the rug on trade union power.

Given the battle with the unions at the time, Bolger's acceptance of his new role has done little to endear him to those Cabinet colleagues who fought with him on the front line with one confiding that these days he'd do anything to pander to anyone's slithering advances from the left of politics - and that was the only publishable comment!