Politicians public property, says Power

A CONTROVERSIAL plan to stop footage of MPs in Parliament being used to satirise, ridicule or denigrate MPs has had a mixed reaction from Wanganui and Rangitikei MPs.
"Politicians are public property, and that is the name of the game," Whanganui MP Chester Borrows told the Wanganui Chronicle.
He believes the new rules are more restrictive than they need to be, but said some restriction was required because people frequently misinterpreted something they saw or heard out of context.
"The photograph on the Dominion Post's (Wednesday's) front age of Tariana Turia seemingly asleep gives no indication of the workload she is currently carrying," Mr Borrows said.
His comments follow the proposal to change Parliament's standing orders to ban the use of television and photographic images to make fun of politicians.
Such images would include those showing MPs asleep in the House, reading magazines or newspapers instead of paying attention to the debate or directing rude gestures and expletives at their colleagues on the opposite benches. Rangitikei MP Simon Power said if MPs didn't want their debating chamber bad behaviour satirised in newspaper photographs and on television then they should simply improve their behaviour.
While Mr Power is not a participant on the committee proposing the new rules, he believed some of his Parliamentary colleagues were being "too precious" in wanting to invoke procedures that would effectively hide their bad behaviour from the public.
"I get thoroughly scrutinised when I am out in public, so I expect that scrutiny to be fairly applied in other places, including the chamber."
Mr Power chairs the Privileges Committee and takes all Parliament's rules seriously so has never appeared on MP Peter Dunne's list of badly behaved MPs.
"It seems to me that the public should expect a high standard (from its Parliamentarians). But none of us is perfect, and sometimes we get it wrong. And (being photographed and televised) is a reality check for those who do behave badly."
However, the bottom line, he said, was that if MPs really wanted to avoid being exposed to ridicule because of their bad behaviour, the easiest thing for them to do would simply be to modify their behaviour before they tinker with the rules.
Tariana Turia said the big concern for the Maori Party was the number of studies that have found that newspapers and television are unfairly unbalanced in their treatment of Maori.
The Te Tai Hauauru MP and Maori Party co-leader said yesterday's newspaper coverage vindicated the study commissioned by the Broadcasting Standards Authority in 2003, which said that in some media denigrating and insulting coverage of Maori was reported.
Mrs Turia said this was a finding that the United Nations Special Rapporteur highlighted in his New Zealand report.
"We are not unduly concerned about the media coverage in terms of our own particular representation," said Mrs Turia, "because we have very clear standards to abide by that we have set ourselves."
"The two big issues for us, though, are to ensure that the behaviour in Parliament improves in the first place; and secondly, for what purposes would the media want to record any events other than the business of the house?"
"We would hope that the Standing Orders Committee report will assist media in resisting the urge to indulge in 'satire, ridicule or denigration' to poke fun at individuals, rather than representing the key policy issues and tensions of the day," Mrs Turia said.
And on the television coverage in the house, co-leader Dr Pita Sharples said the new standing orders would support a more positive parliamentary environment.
Dr Sharples said the Code of Conduct which the party signed up to on June 12 fit well with the Maori Party kaupapa and tikanga, which was the guiding force to influence the way in which they acted in the House.
"Indeed, it builds on the momentum of the MMP parties who have taken a stand to highlight that for some time now, the debating chamber has reflected a poor environment for political debate."
Labour list MP Jill Pettis was unavailable for comment last night.