FINGERS IN THE TILL

The embarrassing revelation last Saturday that Michelle Boag had the audacity to summon the Westpac Rescue Helicopter when she found that she had forgotten her passport has brought home to me once more how lucky we are to live in a country where petty corruption is still frowned upon.
There are many countries around the world where full scale bribery and graft are the norm. These are not countries where any sensible, hard working person would want to live. But there are also countries where small scale violations of trust are increasingly accepted. This strikes me as sad. Australia is one such. If the Auckland police force had been found to be taking bribes, pushing drugs, pimping prostitutes and beating suspects into comas like their Sydney counterparts were found to be a couple of years back, then the whole country would have been mortified. The Aussies however seemed to shrug the whole thing off. I was there at the time and found it disturbing. If a rich and influential person there had been found to be using a charitable organisation to which they had contributed as a personal courier service whenever it suited them, it would hardly have rated as a front page story.
Ms Boag did nothing illegal, let’s be clear about that. And I’m sure that if any of us here on the island had suffered a medical crisis at that exact time the helicopter would have diverted and Ms Boag obliged to take a later flight. But she was guilty of a severe lapse of judgement in a country where we still maintain decent standards of behavior. I for one am grateful for those standards.
The blustering from the Helicopter Trust has cut no ice with the public. They have taken their bruises and must live with them. If locals here see the rescue chopper flying in in future they may ask; “What’s Michelle forgotten this time?”
My personal favorite response was from a theatre friend who suggested that he might go and spray a large H on Ms Boag’s front lawn.
This would of course be WRONG.
Though very funny.