no one's laughing

Tim at Tumeke has a great post about a hui he attended where Te Ururoa Flavell defended the repeal of the Foreshore and Seabed Act.

... After a rough session where we remained unconvinced this bill would do anything other than legitimise all the mining and drilling that is planned by the Crown and will lock in the confiscations that have happened all the way to 2011, Te Ururoa breezily attempted to use the same old bullshit line about being open to ideas. This was too much. They cut the process short and say they will do all the changes at committee stage/2nd reading, but we won't have any chance to object to it then. We can't properly tell him yes or no now to the bill because we don't know what the law will say - and neither does he. It is preposterous.

I said I had put forward ideas at select committee stage but had seen no evidence that anything I or anyone else that wasn't a big infrastructure company had said was taken on board. So how long have we got to get back to him with our ideas that he will be listening to (before the caucus votes for whatever the Nats put in anyway?) I asked. Realistically, I said, how long have we got to email you our ideas on this bill before it's too late. I had my pen poised over my pad and I kept looking at it as he struggled to find an answer. All I could hear was the ticking of the clock and him shuffling papers around for what seemed like an age. I didn't look up at him, just at the tip of the pen. The meeting waited in silence. Then he finally said: "a week." I took a long blink, looked up and repeated, slowly: a week. Maybe it was my unchecked expression of derision that did it, maybe it was the laughter from the others, maybe it was the earlier exchange over Hone and who would be the next male leader of the party now "you pulled the pin on him" that had something to do with it, but he seemed a little irked. "A week," he repeated. "One week" I repeated in disbelief. "You wanted a time: a week." - he reiterated tersely. There was more silence as the bad punchline to an even worse joke sunk in. No one had to say anything - it's a farce.

That week has started running which reinforces the 'farce' - it is a joke but no one's laughing.