Yes...no blogging for a while...tut tut.
So...remember way back in May when some people were confidently predicting that Labour would enter a 'New Zealand'-style deal with Plaid Cymru which would have seen the latter support the former in exchange for the implementation of some policies? Well, that never happened and we can only hope the idea of Wales importing any ideas from NZ is dead.
For my attention has been drawn to this story - the banning of satire and ridicule of MPs in New Zealand's Parliament. The new standing orders, voted in last month, concern the use of images of Parliamentary debates, and make it a contempt of Parliament for broadcasters or anyone else to use footage of the chamber for "satire, ridicule or denigration". It also means cameras have to focus on the speaker "in the case of general disorder in the chamber" - as is wont to happen in Taiwan all the time, for example.
Breaching this could see broadcasters end up in prison. You have to sympathise with Vernon Small, chair of New Zealand's Parliamentary Press Gallery, who says: "If MPs want to improve the reputation of the institution, and of themselves, the answer is surely in their own hands, through improved behaviour."
So let's hope the Assembly doesn't attempt to use its new powers to introduce a similar rule here.* Or we'd all have been deprived of such defining moments in the history of Wales' nascent democracy as this.
*Yes, I know they can't.