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There are a lot of remarkable things about that C-word column yesterday, and one of them is that it is still up online, and apparently no one is sorry for this.

If you haven't seen this column, let me get you up to speed on this:

Yesterday, Sunday Star Times columnist Andrea Vance did something that I would venture no other mainstream columnist has ever done in this country - she called a minister of the Crown a c-word in the newspaper. 

She didn't write the c-word out, she wrote it as c....

The subject of it was the gender pay equity revamp, the minister was Nicola Willis and Andrea wrote - "turns out you can have it all, so long as you're prepared to be a C...."

Now, I don't even know how to start explaining to you how wild it is that that happened yesterday, that Andrea dropped the C-bomb in the Sunday Star Times.

That word is the 2nd most banned word on radio. We are not allowed to say it - and if we do, go to town on us and complain because somebody is going to get in a huge amount of trouble, and we will be saying sorry.

But at least on the radio, to some extent, I think we have the defence of being able to say - Hey, look, it was the heat of the moment and the words slipped out of my mouth.

That is not what happens in newspapers. Words don't just slip out onto the paper, you write it down, you consider it, you rewrite it, you reread it. You make sure that every single word is exactly what you mean to say.

Nothing about that is in the heat of the moment. And then you send it to your editors, and your editors read it, and they look at it and they go - yep, that's okay, they can go in the newspaper. And that it what happened.

Now, I'm not a prude. I am not offended by swearing, I swear myself, and I have also done exactly what Andrea has done. I have said things about ministers that I shouldn't have said, and I've regretted and I've apologized for it.

But this is out of hand, what has happened here. There has to be some decorum. I mean, we can hardly complain about anonymous trolls on social media attacking our female politicians when our very own columnists do it in print with their names attached to it.

And reverse this, by the way, if you're not offended by it:

Imagine it was Jacinda. Imagine that a columnist had written this about Jacinda, how much outrage that would have caused, how cancelled that person would have been. There were other c-words we weren't allowed to say about Jacinda. Cindy was one of them, communist was another.

And if you said either of them, people would flip out.

Well, imagine how people would have flipped out if we'd said the c-word. It is very hard to respect an argument about how Nicola Willis isn't a real feminist in a column that attacks her in the most un-feminist way, right?

It uses the most gendered putdown that you can think of. It uses terms like girl math to basically suggest that she can't balance the country's books because she's a woman.

Now for the record, I think Andrea Vance is a fantastic journalist and an incredibly incisive opinion writer, and I think that her editor Tracy Watkins is the best at what she does, but this was a mistake and it lets everyone down when we drag the tone down that badly.

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