COMMENT:

Politics is a strange old business and on many occasions it's difficult, if not impossible, to read.

It's as though some of the participants in it live in an indestructible, soundproof bubble. They're oblivious to reaction to what they're saying and how it could be perceived by the rest of us.

There are a couple of examples this week.

The first is the Commerce Commission report into whether we're being fleeced, as Jacinda Ardern would have us believe, at the petrol pump. We more than likely are, but then no more than we're being fleeced every time we use a credit card.

For some reason they feel that to use it, for travel as an example, they want to add two per cent on the cost to us for its use. This is the card that you pay an annual fee for and then pay exorbitant interest rates if you extend the credit beyond a month.

So like the fuel industry, banks are getting away with blue murder and so are monopolistic supermarkets and so are building suppliers and the list goes on and on. Unfortunately we live on islands at the bottom of the Pacific, we're a small population where monopolies rule and we have little choice but to pay the price.

But it's reading the politics that surrounds all this that presents a problem.

Ardern tells us climate change is the nuclear-free moment of her generation and monotonously bangs on about zero carbon emissions in the one breath while with the next tells us we're paying too much for our petrol and assures us she'll be doing her best to bring the price down.

And then next year we're having a referendum on whether we should be able to legally smoke dope and yet the Beehive's adamant it wants to stamp out having a legal cigarette by 2050!

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