There is a creeping evil developing in our country that threatens to reduce us from a civilised and semi-orderly society to one ruled by barbarians and vulgarians. It permeates from top to bottom.

It has become acceptable for a Government minister to destroy a citizen’s reputation and career by mouthing unsubstantiated claims under the protection of Parliamentary privilege, backing himself up with an arrogant refusal to withdraw his spurious comments or offer an apology.

Toxic Trev knows full well that, if he repeated his claims against whistle-blower Erin Leigh out in the street, he’d become the first minister to be appearing in two courts at the same time. And the resulting damages for slander and libel might leave him lying permanently in the gutter.

True to form, Mallard blames a public servant for misinforming him, and says that his briefing about Leigh was not sufficiently clear. If that is correct, why was he so swift to accuse Leigh of professional incompetence? Isn’t he also guilty of ministerial incompetence?

It is strange is that his boss, Helen Clark, has (to our knowledge) said not one word about this.

However, few can match our wealthy Deputy Prime Minister Michael Cullen for bad manners and personal abuse. Cullen, who appears to have a visceral dislike of anyone more successful than him, this week called Opposition leader John Key a “rich prick” and a “scumbag, scumbag, scumbag” in Parliament.

That’s a bit rich, coming from what looks very much like a sore p-p-p-person. Key might well retort, as did British politician Denis Healey, that being attacked by the likes of Michael Cullen is rather like being savaged by a dead sheep.

Cullen shouldn’t be the second most important p-p-p-person in New Zealand, expected to set a good example to the rest of us. He belongs in a farmyard.

There’s another disturbing side to this trend towards gratuitous abuse, or condemning people who cannot defend themselves. The DominionPost published unsupported and unattributed records of alleged terrorists’ bugged conversations. By naming no one, they smeared everyone. The terrorism cases crashed and burned, and now the remaining prosecutions for four unlicensed rifles appear doomed.

For justice, a judge will always be more reliable than a journalist.

Even more unpleasant were the scenes outside a court in Christchurch, where a mob – and there’s no other word for it – was allowed to scream obscenities and batter a prison van containing the accused murderer of Emma Agnew, while police looked on, some of them smiling. Just because many of the mobsters were deaf is no excuse for primitive behaviour.

And then, during a panel discussion on Radio New Zealand National’s Afternoons with Jim Mora, a commentator (who is a former police officer and should know better) was allowed to utter, when discussing the Emma case, words to the effect that “the mongrel should plead guilty.”

This rash comment may be libellous and it piles on the prejudice against a man who, under our law, must be presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court. While Radio New Zealand would likely argue that this was a legitimate part of a “robust debate”, it is not. It’s blatantly unfair and it’s one tiny step further towards anarchy.

The leaks of suppressed evidence, the publication of that evidence on the Internet, and the proliferation of uncontrolled blogs (some of them run by New Zealand newspapers and enthusiastically supported by bigots) seem to have led to an assumption that anything goes these days, and that our legal system is somehow more democratised. What rubbish.

More than 67 percent of people consulted in a poll said they did not believe that the release of suppressed evidence would prejudice a court hearing. In another poll, around 80 percent believed the police terror raid actions around the Tuhoe community were legitimate.

But if you took a poll on the re-introduction of capital punishment, at least 80 percent would favour it. That’s because they wouldn’t expect to personally put the rope around someone’s neck, or release the trapdoor and kill them. They just want quick-fix vengeance.

What all this proves is that what people want is not necessarily what they need.

What they deserve and are entitled to is a return to the clear and firmly-applied rule of law. This is unlikely, given that we are governed by a loose group of infantile and occasionally brutally insensitive opportunists who could not run a corner shop, let alone control a country.

The Government and the media had better get a grip, and soon. Otherwise, we might as well cut down the court queues by letting loose the lynch mobs.