By: Barry Soper | Friday, June 08, 2012 6:55 AM

This is a shoot and ask questions later Government. The gunslinger's State Homie John Key, although he does have a team of deputies and one of the newest to be sworn in, Hekia Parata has already found her badge tarnished.

The wild west had become even more unruly than usual. Parata had dipped her toe in the pool of public opinion and found the water was at boiling point.

The changes she'd planned for education were against the fundamental ethos that had been built up by successive Government's for years, starting with Big Dave Lange's 'Tomorrow's Schools'.

If you listen to the Government that's been crowing about improving the quality of teachers but at the expense of class sizes as being the road to the future, surely then we must now, by their reckoning, be looking again at yesterday's schools.

The Homie was fizzing when he arrived late at night in Hamburg from London where he'd brought the family along to Buck House to meet The Queen. He said she was sparkling and so were his eyes as he waxed about being in such revered company.

But then the phone went and his delegated deputies were talking about Parata's Tombstone, her policy was causing the sort of unrest that even Wyatt Earp would have found hard to quell.

The Homie's solution, ditch it. All the money, time and effort that had gone into it was relegated to the rubbish bin, not to mention the $43 million they were telling us it was going to save.

There are more ways to skin a cat and there are always other ways to pass go and collect $200, the outwardly serene but inwardly seething Homie told us.

His deputies will now go and talk to the sector and find other ways to do what they'd been planning.

It's a pity they didn't do that at the beginning. It's reminiscent of their plans to look for gold in the protected tussock land in the wilderness.

Again their pistols were out of their holsters, even before they'd been challenged to the dual!