Politicking tests endurance

Who's going to be beating a path to the ballot box?

It's hard to imagine any silver lining to the dark cloud that has passed over the world since the disappearance of flight MH370 but I think I've found it ... for New Zealanders, at least.

For a whole week, we have been able to go about our business, tune into bulletins and read the front pages of our nation's newspapers without being confronted with the petty and inconsequential political sideswipes that pass themselves off as "news" in election year.

Oh lordy, to think there are 191 days left to endure. That's 275,040 minutes depending on what time you sat down today to enjoy your weekend paper, and whether (like me) you're so keen to end the agony you plan to beat a path to the nearest polling station the moment it opens on September 20.

It's not that I don't enjoy politics (I majored in the subject at university and flirted with arrest during the inevitable student marches that went hand-in-hand with a degree from Victoria in Wellington).

What I don't enjoy is being subjected to an endless cavalcade of petty politicians grasping for exposure like small children at a lolly scramble, prepared to go to dizzy heights and new lows in order to get a vote-grabbing moment in the spotlight.

While in an election year it might be awfully helpful to focus on promoting new policy and educating us on the benefits of voting for party X, instead we seem to be inundated with constant updates on who's been calling who names, and who has reported it to the principal (or in the case of Colin Craig, hired a lawyer).

Although I am an avid consumer of news, I know very little about the Green and Conservative party platform, but I could tell you everything you'll ever need to know (and then some) about the cat-fight their leaders are engaged in over name-calling and who should apologise to whom.

And just when he was riding the seventh wave of a gritty supermarket scandal, Labour's Shane Jones catapulted himself back into murky waters with his regrettably famous "mollyhawk" line, giving the media one more chance to stray off-topic and focus instead on the dirty business of bagging off the opposition.

Essentially an optimistic person who believes in focusing on what I do well instead of what others don't, I struggle to understand the mentality of a politician who seriously believes voters will view them in a good light if all they ever appear to do is condemn their opponents' ideas.

It simply isn't realistic to presume that a new policy promoted as a brilliant solve-all by one party can unquestionably be considered a portent of certain doom to the nation by another.

Life just isn't that tidy.

And even if it was, it would earn some respect (and maybe even a ballot box tick) from this voter if once in a while, instead of acting like the schoolyard bully, a politician used his 10-second soundbite to point out something positive they were promoting, instead of fishing for negatives in every utterance their opponent made.

Show me the policy, baby.

And so it is with a sigh that I bed myself in for a long and unutterably boring year of "news", and wonder how the people who run our country (and the ones who'd desperately like to) actually get anything done between the cat fights and headline-grabbing quotes dedicated to showing off their true colours - and I don't mean red, blue and green.