Lady Macbeth's Descendants Dance Around the Cauldrons

A Virulent Strain of Inquiryitus Unleashed

The current New Zealand government has an acute case of Inquiryitus.  This is a particularly debilitating disease, with no known cure.  It's an affliction with a long history.

Medical experts have suggested that early onset Inquiryitus can be detected in Lady Macbeth's habit of rubbing at imaginary blood spots in the middle of the night.  The rubbing syndrome has developed in our modern polity into launching inquiries.  The intention is that a long, slow, glacial inquiry will rub away the scandal or controversy from human memory.

We have lost count of the number of inquiries launched by the present administration into alleged defects and scandals since it took office a mere six months ago.  Every day, new blood-spot-rubbing inquiries are announced.  Neither the announcements nor the actual glacial inquiries are of any significance any longer.

We have "inquiries" announced into mental health and addiction, Labour Party drunkenness and debauchery, historical state care abuse, high power prices, Pike River Mine entry, taxation, climate change, prisons and incarceration, and the government education system, to name but a few.

Inquiryitus is a virulent disease.
  It can spread rapidly.  Hapless Ministers of the various Departments of Ineptitude imitate each other.  Minister Wobbles is made aware of a bad case of haplessness in her particular department.  What should she do?  "Ah," says Humphrey, "Your colleague, Minister Weebles faced a very similar situation last week.  He launched an inquiry. The media has forgotten about it already."  Minister Wobbles, however, is a rampantly ambitious politician.  Not to be outdone by her "colleague" she announces two simultaneous inquiries: the first will inquire into the alleged haplessness in her Department; the second will conduct a rigorous inquiry into the conduct of the inquiry itself.  This will be followed by a startling, never-before-seen-strain of Inquiryitus.  Minister Wobbles will go on to launch a meta-inquiry into all inquiries conducted in her Department since she took office.   Here lies enough subject matter for ten more years of the rapidly morphing disease of Inquiryitus.

Lady MacBeth was a seriously disturbed individual.  Her political descendants in New Zealand--a world away in both time and distance--have seen the ancient scourge of rubbing spot disease return in a strain ten time more virulent and enervating to the body politic than ever before.