By: Barry Soper | Wednesday, May 23, 2012 6:00 AM

You know the proposal's coming from a wealthy man when he posed it as the $24 million question. The rest of us know it as the $64,000 question but not State Homie John Key.

He was pondering the question that he reckons should be answered by the taxpayer funded blue movie critic Shame Jones. The lascivious Labour man was the Immigration Minister when a Chinese businessman Bill Liu, or whatever his name is, was mysteriously given Kiwi residency even though officials were opposed to it, raising the red flag about his character.

Perhaps Jones mistook the official flag raiser as his party's standard bearer because he totally ignored advice and laid out the welcome mat. The cocky Jones pontificated that politics was a brutal sport and he understands Key wanting his head on a plate, it's the politics of utu. Labour has a crack at Banksie and the Tories have a crack at Shame Jones, he said, referring to himself in the third person which shows his opinion of himself is as high as it's ever been.

Tomorrow the High Court will decide whether there was fraud involved in the case and Jones says he'll have more to say about it once the beak delivers his decision.

And another who frequently uses the third person tag when talking about himself is Luigi Peters. He was facing a $64,000 question as he trudged into the bear pit accompanied by his ever present shadow, former weatherman Brendon Horan, who's now one of his disciples.

With the Budget being delivered tomorrow, he was asked whether the pension age should be raised, and it had nothing to do with the fact that he got his own gold card this year. Four times the question was posed and four times it was avoided.

This former self-appointed Treasurer knows the answer with the old age pension predicted to cost in three years time more than all the welfare cheques put together. To acknowledge the inevitable would betray his sea of grey followers but worse still to deceive himself would be to agree with Key who's staked his job on keeping the retirement age at 65.

Perhaps Luigi should take the hint!