CHRIS McVEIGH: The Thin Veneer

"And Ralph wept for the loss of innocence, the darkness of man's heart and the fall through the air of a dear, wise friend called Piggy."

Lord of the Flies - William Golding.

"The most terrifying thing is that the monsters are not hiding in the dark; they are wearing our clothes, speaking our language and waiting for permission."

Anon.

It started, as these things often do, with a seemingly harmless and innocent moment. Who of us can forget that picture of cosy domesticity as the then Speaker of New Zealand's Parliament sat in his chair in the House of Representatives, bottle feeding an infant on his knee.

Fast forward 7 years to the present day. Not one but two of the current crop of MPs are ejected from the House because the word 'c*nt' was used in Parliament (or 'the c word' as it's coyly referred to in news broadcasts).

The common feature linking both of these regrettable events was a lowering of standards. Once it starts it's downhill from then on and there ain't no stopping it. From uncle Trevor playing the Karitane card in the Speaker's chair to the Maori party MPs dressing like they've been invited to an adolescent come as you are party, to the same dramatis personae performing an impromptu neolithic war dance on the floor of the House and to our old friends the Greens showing solidarity with the PLO by sporting keffiyehs as a badge of their progressive conformity.

Standards of dress, speech and behaviour are there for a reason. They all help to identify and uphold civilised discourse and debate in the conduct of the affairs of the nation. Relinquish any of them and you risk abandoning the entire structure that supports an orderly and humane society.

The choice is simple: do we wish to jettison the language of Shakespeare, Milton and Churchill and replace it with the crude formulations of some primitive sub-culture? Do we wish to eschew those behavioural standards practised and refined over many centuries and employ instead the rough and tumble of a bar room brawl?

Do we want, in short, a Parliament where speeches are peppered with the effings and blindings of MPs dressed in the informal attire of street kids? I think not.

And if you look again at the underlying feature of all of these events, the lowering of the standards of a civilised society, it's but a short leap to the whittling away of the protections and norms that we all take for granted. The elimination of that thin veneer. That is what Ralph had confronted in Golding's great novel, and why he wept.

And if you think I'm being melodramatic and that it could never happen here, think again. Historians have referred to the gradual encroachment on, and elimination of, democratic freedoms in Weimar Germany in the 1930s as 'the salami effect': one slice at a time until one day they woke up to what’d been happening but by then it was too late. The salami had all gone. It's the same with our rules of good order and discipline: each change, each erosion of standards will be justified as being progressive and necessary until it all breaks down, but by then it's too late.

Even now it may be too late to put this particular genie back in the bottle. Those who are benefitting the most from this new informality will not take kindly to being told that there's to be a restoration of the status quo: no more treating Parliament like a creche; no more conducting debates in a style more akin to an argument in a beer garden and no more appearing in the House dressed as if you're going to an audition for the Village People.

It may be too late but I hope not.

Chris McVeigh is a retired KC living in Christchurch. He was previously President of the Canterbury District Law Society and, in an earlier life, a scriptwriter and performer for the satirical TV programme ‘A week of It’