Mr Speaker

To be the Speaker of New Zealand’s parliament is to be one of the most important persons in the land. It could be argued that you are there of and at the whim of the Prime Minister. But you have the right, enshrined by royal decree, to call even a prime minister to account, as did the (now) former speaker Lockwood Smith when he called Prime Minister John Key a naughty boy. I know Lockwood Smith well. I have had the privilege to meet him on many occasions—some have been political, some have been business and some (most) have been entertaining—Lockwood is a fine singer and poet and not slow to show it. In all those meetings and all those roles he has afforded me the greatest courtesy, something others have shared and this week noted voluminously. Lockwood is like that—old school. And if that is to be seen that he is also pompous and pedantic—also noted this week—then in the role of speaker those are not necessarily bad traits and could even be deemed to eminently practical. Lockwood, the dairy farmer from up north brought a gravitas to the role of speaker, something his successor, David Carter, the dairy farmer from down south, seemingly has the traits to emulate. Parliament can be a raucous place—Winston Peters on his own ensures it is so—and Question Time on television is pure theatre, I often wonder what my friend Whetu thinks of it, but with Lockwood Smith at the helm it was rarely directionless and if at times he came across as a headmaster scolding parliamentary school children—then that is simply what he was…and who they are.