I blame the parents, myself

There’s been a lot of commentary in a short space of time about the arrest and subsequent release without conviction of Phil Goff’s twenty-five-year-old daughter Sara for trying to take four tabs of Ecstasy into a music event in New South Wales—hardly the most serious crime on the books, and one which in a more moral society wouldn’t be on the books at all.

But it’s prompted a lot of people to argue that poor Sara shouldn’t be a headline, on the basis that politicians’ loinfruit shouldn’t be fuel for criticism of their parents.

What rubbish. Child-rearing has yet to become an exact science, but it’s very clear that parents play a large part in the creation of their offspring’s personality—and when the actions of children have a bearing on the politicians themselves, or on their policies, then it’s only appropriate that they be judged thereby.

Annette King’s daughter crashing her mother’s ministerial car, which King herself had loaned her, might for example justify the suggestion that King might not be too responsible herself in how she looks after the taxpayers’ property in which she’s been given responsibility.

Bill English’s son’s anti-gay tirades on his Bebo page might be viewed in the context of the increasingly hysterical whispering campaign about the private life of then-PM Helen Clark and her husband, a campaign given tacit support by senior Nats.

Jim Anderton’s utterly misguided enthusiasm for banning party pills was undoubtedly motivated by the 1994 suicide of his daughter Philippa, leaving him utterly immune to reason on the subject of drugs.

And, more recently, Sarah Palin’s Bible-based conservatism, and the “family values” she sought to impose on the country, gave good grounds to talk about both her 17-year-old daughter’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and the unseemly haste with which her parents tried to force her into what looked like an unwilling shotgun marriage with the baby’s father.

So it’s not true at all to say that politicians’ children should always be off-limits to media scrutiny, especially not if their behaviour reflects on that of their parent.

And Sarah Goff’s behaviour does reflect directly on the character her father, doesn’t it. A life of sucking off the taxpayers’ tit himself has clearly rubbed off on his own loinfruit, because we find that at twenty-five-years old this young woman has already begun to throw her life away—starting a life-long dependency on taxpayers’ money as a bureaucrat with the Agriculture and Fisheries Ministry.

A very sad and shocking story indeed.  I blame the parents, myself.