Another heroically barmy cause

Whenever Radio New Zealand journalist Jeremy Rose comes on air, I mentally prepare for a detour into a parallel universe - a left-wing la-la land.

It happened again at the tail end of Mediawatch on Sunday, when Rose interviewed a Massey University student who had set up a website on which people could put questions to candidates for the Wellington mayoralty.

It was obvious from the tone of the item that Rose thought some of these questions deserved wider exposure. There was an implied rebuke of the mainstream media for not having followed some of them up.

So what were some of the questions asked?

One questioner wanted to know what the mayoral candidates thought about the prospect of oil exploration in Pegasus Bay, which was described as being off the Wellington coast.

Last time I checked, Pegasus Bay was immediately north of Banks Peninsula. Somehow I can't imagine even Celia Wade-Brown, conscientious greenie that she is, regarding this as part of her bailiwick.

But more bizarre still was the question from someone who was concerned that one-third of Wellington's homeless were young LGBT people who had been rejected by their families, and what did the mayoral candidates intend to do about this?

Rose noted disapprovingly that this was not the sort of question that mainstream journalists would bother to ask. Well, of course they wouldn't. The notion that the mayor of Wellington should be held responsible for the dysfunctional family relationships of sexually confused young people is plain batty. It simply demonstrated - again - that there are no limits to the demands of the aggrieved for special attention.

On one level, the item was so absurd as to be laughable. In fact I briefly considered the possibility that it was a spoof. But the worrying thing is that Rose is in deadly earnest. And more alarming still is the fact that he continues to abuse his position by using publicly funded air time to promote his heroically barmy pet causes.