Three strikes should apply to politicians across board

Jamie Whyte. PHOTO/FILE

I miss Rodney Hyde. Amidst the drear that the Act Party continuously exemplifies, Rodney had represented a little shining light of self-generated ridicule, whether walking, dancing or flying - especially flying in first class on our dime until caught out and having to pay up.

Following in his dance steps has been a succession of comparative pygmies of humour. Don Brash's admitted peccadilloes can't hold a candle to Rodney's unless you are a fan of the Buster Keaton stone-faced school of comic acting. And John Banks doesn't rate at all simply for playing second fiddle to the megalith that is Kim Dotcom.

Dotcom's delivery of a $25,000 pie in robotic Banksie's facial recognition software, shorting his random access memory, showed who was the real clown.

It comes as a relief, then, to welcome on stage Jamie Whyte as the latest incarnation of the Act brand, as leader.

In appearance, Whyte looks to have come to us from the US, probably Hollywood as a stand-in for Bruce Willis. He's got all the makings of a Hollywood type. To take the job in Act, he's agreed to silence himself on his previous stance on legalising drugs. Instead, while trumpeting law and order, he found merit in legalising incest between consenting adults. Whyte soon regretted this statement, saying while that was his personal belief, as a party leader he needn't have personal beliefs, just party beliefs.

In fact, Whyte's spent much time in the UK. He last worked in finance, much like our current PM, whom he tries, policy-wise, to emulate. Whyte believes in "free markets" (read: unfettered, deregulated corporatised crony capitalism, where profit is privatised and loss is socialised). He would eliminate all labour laws (like those supposed to protect workers' lives). He comes to these beliefs from the lofty heights of Cambridge University, whence he received a D.Phil in - wait, here it comes - truth.

That's his treatise title, and he recently defined "truth" as when you believe something and your action is guaranteed to work out - then it must be true. By those lights, Jamie has just confirmed my granddaughter's faith in the tooth fairy.

Whyte's tooth fairy helped him import from the US another of its discards, called appropriately there the "three strikes you're out" policy. For Kiwis, who are generally a cricket-playing nation, this strange term is borrowed from the American game of baseball, wherein a player who swings and misses three times is called out - and retires, albeit temporarily.

Whyte's import would have a crim who commits three burglaries be required to serve a prison term of three years. In California, where a three-strike law was initiated, they're having second thoughts and dismantling the law. It seems the prison population increased so much and the costs of imprisonment as well, that the budget shortfall meant drastic cuts had to be made in an alternative public domiciliary system, the once-proud state free public tertiary education system.

In the US, the cost of burglaries by individual crims has been shown to be less than the theft of wages by employers and corporations. Recent court cases by low-paid workers forced to work overtime off the books by corporations like Walmart and McDonald's have demonstrated that in the United States the cost of burglaries (US$168 billion annually) is exceeded by the cost of theft of wages (US$238 billion). I suspect New Zealand's figures are proportional.

In that consideration, Whyte's lopsided law and order stance may benefit the private prison industry but achieve little else.

I'm proposing a three-strikes idea of my own. This one applies to politicians and their parties. They get three chances. After three successive failures either to get elected or, if elected, to do no more than provide a water carrier for another team, they'd be "out". They would be required to retire gracefully to wherever it is failed politicians go, like heading an energy company or becoming a made-up ambassador of fishing.