If ever there was a symbol for last week it was my broken back scratcher. This pink-handled extendable number lived in my handbag, ready to be whipped out to entertain a pre-schooler when they were about to lose the plot, to snare something from a high supermarket shelf, or to deal with an elusive itch. But on Friday when I had an itch to scratch, I discovered it in two pieces. It would be easy to just blame disgraced short-lived New Zealand First candidate Stuart Nash for it. Wasn’t everything his fault last week? The hapless Mr Nash had run out of backs to scratch by Wednesday night when he ``resigned’’ so he would not cause a distraction for NZ First. His comments about the woman he would have been running against, Napier’s incumbent Member of Parliament National’s Katie Nimon, inaccurately described how much time she had taken off for maternity leave and accused her of being the laziest MP he had ever come across. It is sad he still insists we all missed the point of what he was trying to say and that his private message to former National minister Chris Finlayson should not have been revealed. Mr Nash’s wife, a public relations professional, said in an article published in the New Zealand Herald she had been telling him for years he is too trusting for politics. Oh, please. There is being trusting and then there is also understanding that when you are running for Parliament, like it or loathe it, your ill-thought out pronouncements in any forum run the risk of becoming front page news. There is also being trustworthy, something which Mr Nash struggled with when he was a Labour minister, eventually sacked for disclosing confidential information from a Cabinet meeting to former donor businessmen. To hear NZ First Leader Winston Peters in a television interview extolling Mr Nash’s work as a minister but ignoring or seriously downplaying his unseemly demise was another example of history denial. (Anyone who looked up television footage from the announcement of Labour’s much oil and gas ban and the pronouncements of Shane Jones then will understand how ludicrous Mr Peters’ reinvention of that occasion is. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has been right to call it out.) It has been fascinating to see politicians of all stripes falling over themselves to see who can provide the best condemnatory soundbite over Mr Nash’s comments regarding Katie Nimon. It is easy to understand the outrage, and I am among those happy to see the back of the intemperate Mr Nash, but if members of the coalition want us to believe they are born-again feminists, I don’t buy it. These were the same people happy to secretly plan to sweep reform to pay equity law without any input from any of the thousands of women affected, at the same time stringing along those already involved with the previously agreed process. Mr Peters has been talking up his party’s record on women’s issues. Did anyone in NZ First break from government ranks last year when the pay equity law was pushed through in little more than a day? Ironically, on the same evening the Stuart Nash story was hitting the headlines, our women parliamentarians showed they are capable of cross-party consensus on a women’s issue. It was the first reading of the Crimes (Virginity Testing Practices) Amendment Bill, a Member’s Bill under the stewardship of Labour MP Priyanka Radhakrishnan although it had originally been proposed by one of her colleagues Vanushi Walters. If passed, the Bill will make virginity testing (inspecting female genitalia for the purpose of ascertaining a history of vaginal intercourse) and the related practice of hymenoplasty (repair or reconstruction of the hymen) illegal. Under the Bill, it would also be a crime to send a child or induce an adult who was a New Zealand citizen or ordinarily resident here to go overseas to undergo these procedures. All parties supported the Bill to go to the Governance and Administration select committee. As Ms Radhakrishnan said, the Bill seeks to ``end a practice with no place in a just society, a practice that harms women and girls in silence, in shame, and too often in the shadows and under the guise of cultural or religious expectation’’. Virginity was a social construct with absolutely no scientific biological or medical validity. Watching the debate on the Bill, it was uplifting to see the warmth our women politicians can display to one another across the aisle. It might not attract the same attention as a man saying stupid stuff, but wouldn’t it be great to see more of that? At least thinking about it since has been a welcome distraction from any inaccessible itches while I await a replacement back scratcher. Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
