Well we were spared the icy Amy Adams, and the feisty Paula Bennett remains as Deputy Leader of the National Party. So there is some good news for those of us who believe that it’s at least preferable that our leaders present a tolerably pleasing impression to the rest of the world.

I’m on shaky ground here, I know. New Zealanders have the admirable quality of placing greater weight on substance than appearance or mellifluous voices in choosing their political leaders. Think Savage, Kirk, Rowling, Key, Clark… But their tolerance for idiosyncrasy is not without limit. Bob Jones effectively put an end to Rowling’s career by dubbing him ‘the mouse’ on account of his very light voice.

I have reason to remember this particularly well. In a previous incarnation I hosted a late night TV show called Edwards On Saturday. We had Bill and Glen Rowling on one night as the main guests. Glen played the piano and Bill talked to me. The programme was broadcast live.

About half way through, as I was interviewing Bill, there was a minor commotion. Bob Jones walked in through the studio door accompanied by a human-sized mouse on a leash, squeaking. Inside the mouse costume was broadcaster Jim Healey. Bob had told security that he and Healey (sans mouse costume) were late guests on the programme and been allowed in.

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that this guest appearance of ‘Mouse Rowling’ was a factor in ending a very decent politician’s career.

You may not like it but, in politics, image really matters.

[Coincidentally this story, headed Row Erupts over Sistine ‘Disaster’, appeared in this morning’s (October 2) Herald.]

I think it was Bob Jones who rather sardonically observed some years ago that one of the worst developments of the second half of the 20^th century occurred when international travel ceased to be the preserve of the rich and became available to the middle and working classes.

It’s difficult to rail against the evils of tourism when one is a tourist oneself, but I found Bob’s words ringing in my ears on almost every day of our three-week holiday in Italy. Our journey took us to Rome, Florence, Siena, Venice and Milan. With the exception of its magnificent cathedral, Milan has little to offer the visitor other than expensive shopping. But you could spend weeks in any of the other four cities and not even begin to exhaust their scenic, architectural, aesthetic and historic splendours.

In his poem Leisure, William Henry Davies coined the well-known lines ‘What is this life, if full of care, We have not time to stand and stare.’  We would have liked to stand and stare at many of the splendours I’ve referred to, but you can neither stand nor stare when on every street or piazza, in every church, museum or gallery, before every monument, statue or painting, or in the vicinity of anything that can remotely be described as ‘famous’, you are little more than a teardrop, swept along in a relentless tide of humanity whose sole purpose is to ‘get a picture’ and move on.

The behaviour of these photographic trophy hunters is indistinguishable from that of bargain hunters as the department  store doors are thrown open at the start of some massive, ‘everything must go; 75% off; all you can carry; closing-down’ sale. The law of the jungle. The survival of the fittest.

Prominent among these seething masses are tour groups numbering up to a hundred people, a relentless phalanx of headset-wearing factoid collectors,  remotely controlled by a parasol-toting guide, determined to keep up the pace. ‘The Birth of Venus is next, so we need to keep moving. Can you all see me? Don’t want anyone getting lost. Just keep your eye on the pink umbrella.’ Click, click, click, click, click. Flash, flash, flash, flash, flash.

It is the digital camera, cheap to use, easy to operate and delivering instant gratification,  that has been responsible for this tsunami of picture-taking and in part, I suspect, for the explosion of international tourism itself.

But the tragic irony is that these tourists never actually SEE any of the things they photograph. In their frantic desperation to capture and store everything on their digital cameras (and mobile phones) they have no time to actually LOOK at anything.

This was very well expressed in an essay by Mark Dubovoy entitled  Are Museums Destroying Art? Lamenting the decision of the Louvre to allow photography inside the museum, he described a recent visit to re-view the Mona Lisa:

‘The museum was packed with large groups of people in tour buses with loud and impolite guides. Most of the people were unruly, loud and pushy and worst of all, the only thing they were interested in was shooting a picture of the Mona Lisa.  I can say without hesitation that the vast majority of the people I saw that day never saw the painting  except in a small cell-phone or camera screen.  Seeing the actual work of art seemed completely irrelevant to them. The only objective was to snap a “trophy shot” of the painting.

‘The real problem was that the people were so unruly and impolite, that those of us who wanted to observe the painting could not do it.  

 ‘As if that was not bad enough, the next time I returned to Paris and went to the museum, things had gotten even worse.  While the last time the sole purpose of these people being there was to grab a trophy shot of the piece, now the new fad was to put their face in front of the painting and have someone else photograph them.  So now we had red lights, green lights, tourist faces, flash bursts and people shoving and pushing to get their faces in front of the work of art.’

Duboyoy’s experience of the Louvre was similar to our experience of the Vatican Museum. It was almost impossible to move as tourists photographed every painting, every tapestry, every statue and bust. The clear imperative was not to miss anything, to take everything home.

But this was mild compared to the horror of our visit to the Sistine Chapel.

As you go down the steps to enter the Pope’s private chapel, there are repeated announcements in half a dozen languages that taking photographs is forbidden and asking visitors to keep a respectful silence. But inside there is a bedlam of noise and camera flashes as thousands of people, packed together like sardines, jostle to capture Michelangelo’s famous ceiling on their digital cameras and mobile phones, ignoring the repeated shouts of the attendants: ‘No photo! No photo!’ It is a scene worthy of Hieronymus Bosch.  

Though I did take some photographs of everyday scenes on city streets and canals of Venice, we brought home no pictures of great works of Italian art  or sculpture or architecture. But we would have liked more time to ‘stand and stare’, to store our pictures of these beautiful cities where they really belong – in memory.

So should we follow Bob’s line of thinking and institute a world-wide ban on international tourism for all but the rich, the highly educated and those with breeding and impeccable manners? It’s an attractive thought. But it might be simpler to outlaw photography in the great musems, art galleries, churches and other places of  cultural and hisoric interst in the world and to make it an offence to have in one’s possession in a public place any camera or device not requiring film to capture an image. Draconian perhaps, but for the vast majority of today’s tourists, a week in London, Rome or Paris woudn’t even be worth the price of a discounted fare in zoo class.  Heaven!