I read the news today. Oh Boy!

There were/are 3 things that prickled me this morning on the news, which in no particular order are

1. Roman Polanski. - Moral indignation from the elitist bleating about cultural significance of his works and how he should be granted clemency. I say "What about all the good things Hitler did?" It's not good enough to claim it's 30 years - it could be 300 years, 3 years, 3 days it would not make a difference, plying a teen with alcohol and drugs to have sex with them isn't legal, wasn't then, isn't now. IF Mr. P had any backbone he would have stayed to clear his good name. He Didn't.

2. Some Cellist is playing his thing in Auckland, and the advertising goes something like "acclaimed as a phenomenon by The Herald (a newspaper". Not, you note, acclaimed by Mr.Billy Perkins, Staff Writer, as a phenomenon, but hidden behind a facade that "The Herald" implies gravitas. The Herald speaks we listen!

3. Ministerial allowances. So an MP has been dobbed in for claiming an allowance on a house he owns and lives in. The bureaucracy that condones this is not configured to catch people out, but to ensure that the allowances are meted out to the claimants. The bureaucracy is in place to serve the bureaucracy, no other reason. They don't check the validity of the claim, but only the receipts and mathematics are correct so they can process the claim. All care no responsibility.

As to claiming the allowance or perks, which employee for any company given a list of claimable things would not go out of their way to ensure they could claim everything, and which employee would be the advocate and loop-hole advisor to others to allow maximum claim under "the rules"

The only people going on about this are the indignant people who cry "public trough" at the drop of a hat - you know they typically are "I know my rights" type people.

Sure the allowance is a rort. It always has been. And this would be the top of a scary iceberg if we were really interested in looking in detail at everything that MP's could and probably do claim from a daily newspaper, magazine subscriptions, stamps and a lot of other things.

Just saying.