Egregious Evolution Expectations

The ever-interesting Jake Quinn over at Life and Politics makes a very valid point on the nature of a political system that seems to encourage sheer bloody-mindedness over anything else:

That is, that if you announce a policy, and then sensible people suggest you should refine it one way or another, that you should never ever act on this advice because it would then become a flip flip, for which you will be murdered by the  ”gotchya” press.

Yep, I don’t think I could put that any better actually. I find it totally surreal that a politician can stand up and say “You know, now that I think about it further I’d like to refine what I said earlier into something even better” and the media – and political opponents – can frown on that.

“Say it ain’t so! Through a process of careful consideration someone came to a point of view different to that which they said previously! You don’t want someone like THAT running your country now, do you? No, it’s blinkers we need.”

My pet peeve actually goes a little further than this though, and is one delightfully leveled at Grant Robertson in the house yesterday.

Tony Ryall took a swipe at Robertson, pointing out that Labour between ’85 and ’90 had cut however many public sector jobs, to which Robertson quite rightly replied that he was in third form in 1985.

But why do we do this at all? “Your political party did something twenty four years ago that is contradictory to what you are now suggesting, and god knows nobody could ever change their mind in a quarter of a century“.

I propose a moratorium on historical stories in parliament. Really, nobody cares. It is just spectacularly childish to be throwing things like this at each other.

I should mention of course that it’s not just National / Ryall who do this. He just happened to do it yesterday and so is fresh in my mind.

Politics generally has a lot to learn from the scientific method. Science is all about discovering things you do to be wrong and learning from that, accounting for your errors to form an ever improving hypothesis. Politics seems to be about tying yourself to horrible dogmatic party beliefs and refusing to buckle, about painting people one way because the party they happen to be a member of behaved a certain way however long ago.

Grow up and accept that learning from mistakes and evolving is not a bad thing.