"Inveterate disappointment"

I received an email overnight quite taking me to task for giving poor Rodney's speech a hard time yesterday. My correspondent was mystified at my dismissal of it, and I was accused of "snarling hatred." Me! Snarling hatred!

Let me tell my correspondent, if they're reading this, that my feeling toward the ACT Party is not so much hatred as "inveterate disappointment." It's an emotion I've felt ever since that party was set up and issued these founding principles:

• Individuals are the rightful owners of their own lives and therefore have inherent freedoms and responsibilities.
• The proper purpose of government is to protect such freedoms and not to assume such responsibilities.

Now let me hasten to add that I have no problem with those principles; far from it. They're fine words -- just as you'd expect when they were written by Libertarianz founder Ian Fraser, just before he left the ACT party in disgust and disappointment.

My own disappointment lies in the fact that the ACT Party clearly feels they're no more than fine words; they have a problem with putting the party's principles into party policy -- which was the very reason that the man who wrote those principles left the ACT Party and founded Libertarianz.

They are, let me repeat, fine principles -- but they are principles from which the ACT Party with all its many resources and many, many fine people has been retreating ever since they were first written down. Right from those early days it's been one step forward, and three more back. The party that should have shouted those principles from the rooftops, who should have lived the values they claimed to stand for, instead became enmired in politics in the very worst sense of the word while the principles went by the board -- and anyone perusing the party's policies could be forgiven now for being befogged as before as to where those principles have gone. Certainly not into policy, or yesterday's speech.

Hence my disappointment. I had seen signs that perhaps, with the very survival of his party at stake, this year might be different. This speech yesterday "setting the scene for ACT for the year" shows that I was wrong. Hence my bitter disappointment. I gave a brief example of what the ACT leader might have said about the issues he canvassed, based on the very principles his party claims to uphold, a small sample of which was at once more principled and inspiring and full of fire than Rodney's uninspired platitudes. Neither fire nor brimstone was evident in that.

There is one thing however to be grateful for. Thankfully, if that speech really does signal the year ahead that Rodney is planning, then it's safe to say that the ACT Party will self-destruct this year out of sheer boredom.

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