There is little going on in the South West Pacific as is usual at this time of year. Papers are full of daft pictures of summer - kids running through sprinklers and jumping off wharves, ice cream, pohutukawas and the like. Great for filling up the family album but hardly fare for a supposedly major national newspaper. A read of the Herald at this time of year generally consists of a few minutes on the sports pages and a quick flick through the rest.
Doing that this morning there is some space given to a 'study' (preserve us from bloody ersatz non scientific damned studies) that shows that the average tourist has a carbon footprint that can only be erased by planting 4 squillion hectares of (presumably native) bush or everyone in China changing to those squiggly light bulb bizzos or..... who the hell cares. How can I continue typing this bollocks - vomit really is not good for the continuing functionality of keyboards.I wander on past the Golf Warehouse adverts and am about to repair to the fields when a syndicated piece about the merits (or not as it turns out) of democracy hoves into view. This fits in nicely with what I spent a small part of last evening reckoning with.
I made an effort to try and understand what this odious Electoral Finance Act means to your average Joe - i.e. me. The amount of bandwidth being taken up by this in the Blogosphere is vast. Most of the contributions are absolute tosh (as is to be expected) but the theme that runs through it all is that no one really understands it. Mike Moore prattled on about it at some length yesterday opining that such badly and hastily written legislation will provide endless sport for all sorts of people who will be looking for ways to push the envelope. This has already started, of course, with an early runner being a rather obviously titled website called Don't Vote Labour springing up. It is thought that this is probably illegal. There is then acres of opinion as to what will be done about it. Answer - well no one really knows. There is apparently a clause in the Act that gives powers of discretion (and it is not readily apparent to whom) as to whether breaches of the Act are prosecuted if they are 'insignificant'. Very dangerous stuff and very reminiscent of the codas to the Anti smacking nonsense. And hasn't that worked like a charm - not a kid killed for, let me see, a couple of days now.
So we have a law aimed at controlling what people can say breaches of which can be prosecuted or not at the whim of........ I'll let you fill in the blanks. This is scary stuff.
Let us cast our mind back as to which particular nut this sledgehammer was designed for. It is Labour's revenge for the Exclusive Brethren fiasco (which you may recall effectively lost the Nats the 2005 election). We must be protected from 'money buying elections'. Things must be fair. I have opined before as to how much I hate bloody fairness. Life ain't fair and nor should it be. There has to be a pecking order and if a bit of discrimination is required to get that, then so be it. So we have the assumption that everything must be fair - wrong. And then the assumption that the great unwashed is so daft as to not be able to see through bought propaganda - insulting but depressingly has ring of truth to it.
Which at last brings us to Winston Spencer. The syndicated piece on the opinion page (from The Independent as I recall) argues that western democracy is not all it is cracked up to be. He author kicks off with one of Winston's quotes 'It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried'. He then carries on to place an even better one 'The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter'. That is why we have the current administration, The Peoples Government of Aoteoroa. Thick people have a vote - what other excuse can they possibly have. It is argued that a government by selection as opposed to election has merit. With the bloody mess we have been led to by Clark and her lickspittles it is a difficult argument to rebut. Having decided that great swathes of the general populace are not to be trusted with a vote you do have a slight problem in chosing who is going to do the selecting. Easy peasy - I'll do it.
Mr Independent goes off track a bit by using China as his example as to what ca be done. It will come as no surprise to people who are not first time visitors to this blog that I have a much better role model - Singapore.
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