Someone on the recently appointed Parliamentary Service Commission is being a twat. My suspicions rest on Michael Woodhouse and Te Ururoa Flavell. But seeing as there's six on the committee and they can't reach a majority, maybe some other Norms are complicit in deciding the fate of Deaf MP Mojo Mathers and her right as an MP to participate in the House.
The Greens have released the Chapman Trippy legal advice that got up DPF's nose. The wiggy advice says pretty much what I was banging on about the other day, albeit with more coherence, legal jargon and footnotes.
It concludes that Closed Captioning is not just a matter of Mojo's participation in Parliamentary proceedings, but everyone from the tens of thousands of NZers with variable hearing to the tired and emotional politicians who require easy access to an immediate transcript in order to double take what was just said.
It wasn't so long ago that the Speaker's Office was commemorating 70 years of public good radio broadcasts of the House. It's coming up to the 76th anniversary of this fundamental right, yet here we are with slack MPs dragging their feet on an obvious communications failure for one of their own.
If the Parliamentary Service Commission doesn't come to its senses soon, their names will end up in the pot with all the past, present and future Mormons I'm planning to mass baptise into Satanism (It's a surprisingly straight-forward incantation involving rubber chickens, wingnuts, a Smith Bible, maple syrup and a weekend in Palmy).
