As I watch the Prime Minister, as I do for Post-Cabinet each Monday, I wonder whether he regrets ever entertaining ACT's Treaty Principles Bill. 

Because every time he talks about it, he dances on the head of a pin. 

It was suggested that the draft bill was headed to Cabinet for discussion yesterday. So a little bit of frothing at the mouth from the media as they fired off question after question as to where this thing might be heading. 

Where it is heading, by the way, is to first reading, then to select committee and, if David Seymour can't turn the tide, it will die at that point. 

For something that most likely won't see its conclusion, we have spent a lot of time and energy angsting over it. 

It has been a long time, if ever, that we have waxed and waned and twisted and bent ourselves into a knot over something that is basically just a debate. It's an exchange of ideas driven by the concept that being equal based on race is something we should aspire to 

To show you how mad it's all got, the Prime Minister was able to bat away virtually all questions by simply stating he doesn’t talk about what happens in Cabinet. 

But then he said, I think mistakenly, that he hadn't actually seen a copy of the draft bill, meaning if he hasn’t seen a draft, it can't really have been talked about at Cabinet. Or can it? 

Someone then asked whether there actually was a draft bill at all, at which point I think he had worked out his error and returned to talking about things that may or may not have been talked about in Cabinet and how he doesn’t talk about them outside Cabinet, or indeed whether anything to be talked about even existed. 

The sad thing about all this is it shows we are not really up to much by way of big debates. 

Big debates should not be feared. But when you have a three party Government with two parties seemingly against an idea from the start, and one in particular looking increasingly anxious, not to mention the wider panic from the Waitangi Tribunal to the churches, it reaffirms this is a country where bold thinking doesn’t often find a space to be aired.