OnPoint by Keith Ng

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It pains me to say this, it really does: Peter Dunne is right to pussy out. It's not that I have anything against him, but I've always held Edmund Burke's statement close to my heart:

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

It's the difference between elected leaders and populists. Dunne was clearly reading from the same page in his articulation of his party's pansiness. As much as I like to mock what is clearly a wimp-out, his reasoning is sound. The nature and the content of the law – that is, electoral law – is pretty unique. Democracy relies on participation, and participation relies on trust. The EFA's opponents attempted to frame it as “a self-serving attack on the freedom of our electoral process”. And they succeeded. To pass it now is to allow the fear, doubt and cynicism they created to be connected to the electoral system itself.

However, even when our representatives do sacrifice their judgements and wimp-out, they still owe us their industry – and if Dunne thinks that it's “pointless continuing to attempt to [persuade people about the EFA]”, then he really would be betraying his constituents.

While Dunne's speech was a mix of the tragic and the weasely, Hide continues to hit the “you're fucking kidding” note. Whether the campaigns to abolish slavery and to give women the vote would have been treated as third party electioneering by the EFA is a legally debatable point, but Hide says that if they were, then they would have had to register with the government. Yeah, so?

These kinds of rhetorical reacharounds are grossly offensive. What exactly is he trying to insinuate? That the abolitionists would have went “aw, I can't be bothered registering as a third party, let's never speak of this emancipation stuff again”? That the women's suffrage movement would have failed, had it been unable to to spend more than $120,000 on phone spamming the country? It's a cheap bloody trick, and he insults the sources he's drawing from.

This is all the more tragic, as Boscawen has finally managed to convince me that the EFA is, in fact, a good thing, by reminding me that $120,000 wasn't the spending cap at all.

To communicate with your fellow countrymen [with more than $120,000], all you need to do is find 499 friends and start a political party. Piece of cake!”

He's being sarcastic, but um, he's right – if you want to spend more than $120,000, all you need to do is find 499 supporters and start a political party. (Credit, incidentally, goes to NZ First MP Barbara Stewart, for telling Boscawen that in the first place.)

Until Boscawen put it to print, I hadn't realised how stupid it sounds: you want to spend more than $120,000 on a campaign, but getting 500 members is too hard? The process of registration is so impossible, that it amounts to government suppression?

Dude. The Libertarianz can do it. The Destiny Party can do it. Even the WIN Party can do it.

Is Boscawen really worried about the plight of groups like the Sensible Sentencing Trust or Family First, with their “many thousands of members”, who can all too easily be trapped into raising far too much money and being unable to spend it? If they just register as a political party, then they'd have a $1m cap, plus another $20k for each electorate candidate they stand.

This isn't about how much money third party can spend, this is about how much money third party can spend before they have to become political parties. As much as Boscawen would like to paint political parties as parliamentary fatcats, they're not. You haven't heard of half of them. I would wager that with all the non-parliamentary parties combined would have far less money than the Maxim Institute or the Exclusive Brethrens, or, obviously, groups like the Business Roundtable or the EPMU.

“Political parties” is not a predefined group of privileged elites, it's a status that isn't very hard to obtain. More fundamentally, if a group is trying to spend more than $120,000 on influencing an election, then they are clearly parties interested in politics, hence the term “political parties”. If you want to set up a shop, you start a company. If you want to run a election campaign, you start a political party. It's not a fence to keep groups out, it's barely a hurdle, it's an insistence that these groups carry a label that is consistent with their intentions.

I'm not convinced about philosophical soundness of this, but the ridiculousness of Boscawen's claim has made me reframe the way I think about the EFA. It doesn't change the technical problems with the act, nor the fact that Labour pushed through this piece of electoral reform without consensus or consultation, but I now support the idea behind the act. Coming on-board just as the flames are reaching the helm is somewhat awkward, but hey, here I am. Thanks, Boscawen.

And unlike Peter Dunne, I'm looking forward to round two next year.

Over dinner on Monday, Jon and I got into a rather sombre conversation about the last days of Hemingway, which he spent in Ketchum, Idaho. When the similarly doomed Hunter S Thompson retraced Hemingway's footsteps – right to the very last – he came to the conclusion that he was, like Hemingway, no longer connected to the zeitgeist. His life as a writer had, therefore, finished.

I hadn't really made this connection before, but whether it's “news sense”, “nose for a story” or a “sense of the people”, the connection to the zeitgeist is at the core of this, whatever it is that I'm doing to lead you to read this. It was an articulation of my fear about coming back to New Zealand – to be so disconnected from the underlying currents of the times, that I could no longer do this.

It's a bit like land. You wouldn't think twice about it when you're standing on it, but once you go beyond the horizon, it becomes abstract – and you wouldn't know where to start looking for it.

I had really dreaded wading into the EFB debate. I felt completely clueless. Not so much about the facts or the arguments. I walked into a conversation between Graeme and a National researcher at their Christmas party last week; the legal arguments were amusingly byzantine, but manageably incomprehensible.

No, the real mystery was the ferocity and shrillness of the debate. I'd witnessed the continual escalation of the debate from afar, and fuck, it was scary. It got louder and louder, became painful and completely incoherent. The strands of arguments made sense in their own right, but they were escorted by increasingly thuggish rhetoric, and threaded together by a narrative that I just plain didn't get.

And, like the equally painful noise around the TSA, it wasn't just a narrative. It was a worldview. The arguments came out of a meta-narrative about what's going on in this country, and it wasn't the New Zealand I knew.

My reintegration into Wellington has been a relief. It hasn't taken me long to remember what the Wellington machine is – a giant, noisy smoke machine. The nation is not ablaze; they just left the smoke machine on for too long.

I chalk it up to a concept that I would like to coin rhetorical hyperinflation. It's the effect of continual oneupmanship, where each outraged hyperbole and bitchy namecalling has to be more outraged and bitchy than the last.

But it's not a frivolous metaphor – with each upward spiral of vitriol, the value of the words decreases.

Contrary to appearances, the debate hasn't been getting more heated. It's been dying a slow, desperate death. Even as the voices grow more shrill and the words more angry, people are becoming more cynical about the debate itself and the institutions responsible for it.

People are losing faith in the currency of politics.

But Labour's “people don't care so shut up” position is cynical, too. Sure, the debate has gone way out of proportion, and the shrillest of the bill's opponents have done their cause a great disservice, but now Labour is trying to get a free ride out of this just because the opposition have overplayed their hand.

There are genuine issues there, and today's Herald editorial show precisely how the debate has been fucked up.

The debate can boil down to two basic interpretations. One, which is the view of this paper, is that the Bill makes democracy in New Zealand less free. The other is that, yes, it does do that, but it is a necessary evil to rid the country of covert manipulation from the likes of the Exclusive Brethren. National should be seizing its chances to hammer home that first point and ensure that the public realises that from January 1 political discourse will be restricted. A simple message needs simple communication”

The first “interpretation” is an argument in the second. It's not an argument in its own right. Why? Because all electoral laws, by definition, make democracy in New Zealand less free. 3 month campaigning period? Less freedom. No electioneering on polling day? Less freedom. No buying votes? Less freedom.

Laws are restrictions on freedoms. Electoral laws are restrictions on democratic freedoms. The point is not whether the EFB restricts democratic freedoms – it's an electoral law, of course it does – the point is whether, on balance, the restrictions promote a healthier democracy, and whether those restrictions unfairly favour or disfavour specific groups in society.

The “simple communication”, as the Herald puts it, doesn't even get people started on the real debate. Of course, if the Herald was actually concerned with debate, then it wouldn't have criticised John Key for making arguments that were “too low-brow, too detailed and too open to argument”. By low-brow, I assume they mean that he didn't ratchet up the rhetoric to the Herald's mighty standards, and by too open to argument, I guess that meant he wasn't restating meaningless truisms.

It may be imprudent of me to think that I have a better grasp of the zeitgeist than that grand dame of New Zealand, the organ that Paul Holmes would look like if he was fed through a printing press, the New Zealand Herald. Perhaps. But they've really pissed in the pool on this one, soiling the debate, and that will remain, even if people are still willing to swim in it.

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Changing countries is always a disorientating experience. You have to think in a new currency, speak in a new language, adapt to new cultural rules – and all before you get out of the airport, preferably.

I knew about three words in Japanese, but fortunately, much of Japanese is written in Kanji, which is more or less the same as written Chinese. That meant that I could read a third of everything. It's also the third which is hardest for Westerners to learn, which was a happy coincidence. Traveling with my Kiwi friends in Japan, they could read everything *but* the Kanji, and so with our powers combined, we had the literacy of 9-year-old.

I couldn't say anything in Japanese, though. Except for “hai”, which is accompanied by a slight bow and means “yes”. They're big on agreeing in Japan, and 80% of the time, “hai” is the appropriate response to whatever the other person is saying.

My one word Japanese impersonation was so good, in fact, that people genuinely thought I was Japanese. Though that presumably meant that they also thought I was... um, differently-abled. Conversely, when I cracked out my spectacularly awful Mandarin in China, everyone thought I was speaking quite well... for a Korean.

The experience made me far more understanding of the touts in India who kept yelling “hello Japan!” at me.

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Traveling down south, I passed through Kokura, an uneventful city with a surplus of spicy cod roe (the mysterious fish-egg sausage I had in Kyoto), as well as a lovely monorail.

It's little more than a footnote in the annals of history, but I suppose it's happy to be there – it was the original target for the second atomic bomb. Cloudy skies meant that Kokura became synonymous with cod roe, rather than nuclear annihilation.

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“Democracy Under Attack from Government”, eh? Jebus – big call from the Granny.

The editorial makes a sound argument (and one that's been bouncing around on blogs for a long bloody while) though it neglects the other side of the debate. i.e. How to stop elections from being bought.

Still, they're putting themselves in an awfully vulnerable position. Much of the spending covered by the Electoral Finance Bill would be spent on advertising, and plenty of that would be spent on advertising in the Herald and its sister publications – or not, if the bill is passed.

It's not that I don't trust the integrity of their reporting. I have a great deal of respect for John Armstrong, and Audrey Young's work on this has been particularly incisive and meaty. But for the Herald to take a strong editorial stance on an issue where they have a big financial stake, it is, even with the best intentions, a bit iffy.

And while it may be rich for this to come from a blogger, a campaigning paper looks really ugly, too. Asking loaded questions like: “Is the bill restricting political campaigning an attack on democracy?” is bad enough. (Consider how “Is secret campaigning by private lobby groups an attack on democracy?” would have gone down.)

Then using a comments page to justify a report of a public landslide? Newspapers still seem to engage with readers on a “excite, incite, sum up outrage in 20 words or less” formula. These kinds of stories are always frustrating, but with the Herald on crusader-mode, it's taken on an extra element of pompousness:

Public opinion has swung behind the Herald's call for the Electoral Finance Bill to be scrapped.”

Readers ... have also been almost unanimously in support of a front page editorial today which said: 'democracy is not a device to keep the Labour Party in power'.”

The campaign has also won the support today of National leader John Key”

... as if John Key didn't give much thought to the issue until the Herald brought it to his attention.

For all its flaws, this bill – and the debate surrounding it – is about the role of money in elections, not free speech. The role of public funding, private donations, anonymous contributions are all, quite legitimately, up for debate. Trying to vilify anyone who supports public funding as trying to hijack the machinery of the state, and anyone who supports more private funding as trying to buy elections really doesn't help.

It does, however, go to show why this debate is so difficult and so damn ugly.

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Throughout my year away, the only New Zealanders I saw on TV were the Flight of the Conchords. They always make New Zealand seem so small, so accessible and so funny. So I get back into the country, and immediately see Jemaine walking down the street.

I guess what they say about NZ is true, after all. Good on ya, Jemaine.

When I decided five years ago that I wanted to be able to work and travel at the same time, I hadn't envisaged myself working in a Tokyo porn parlour servicing clients while sexually frustrated Japanese salarymen... relaxed around me. No, I really didn't see it coming.

It's one of the strange little ironies of the tech age that the more prevalent a technology becomes, the more difficult it is to publicly access. In India, internet cafes and phone booths were all over the place and cost next to nothing. In Japan, making a 5 minute call to Hong Kong cost about $15. It's not that I was cheap (well, not *just* because I was cheap), but I had to put in coins so often that it might as well have had a hand-crank. Internet cafes have a status closer to cinemas - small ones don't exist, and you really have to go out of your way to find the big ones.

Then I found a "private internet/DVD booth" place that was actually a really good deal. For about $6/hr, you got your big-screen multimedia computing suite with internet access, a completely private booth, a wee bed, and, um, as much porn as you can stuff into a shopping basket (that's a lot). There were also four boxes of tissues, which I used liberally to wipe my chair.

You could also purchase underwear from a vending machine. Fresh, clean underwear, that is. Not the other kind.

I suppose that it's no seedier than any other adult entertainment establishments around the world. It's just like a Love Hotel. By yourself. It was, however, a strange place to conference call with clients. Clients who don't ask you what you are wearing, anyway.

The question that remains is obvious: Can I bill my client for this?

"Telecommunications cost, ￥1000, Porn Parlour."

I'm sure accounting will understand.

I also resided in a capsule hotel in Nagoya, featuring rooms large enough for four coffins, if you emptied their contents and cremated them.

I was giddy at the prospect, as I'd always just assumed that we'd all be living like this in the 21st century. The actual 'hotel' was a bank of about 80 of these, which were actually quite comfortable and no more claustrophobic than a bunk bed. The straw 'door' - rather than, say, an air-tight steel door with no handle on the inside - helped.

The hotel is built around its spa and sauna, where everyone is naked, so there's pretty much naked men going to and from every part of the hotel (and, for that reason, no women). That's just the norm. There's also a lounge full of reclining chairs where the more budget-conscious guests slept.

It's all been weird, but I do feel that I'm having an authentic Japanese experience: Working all day, emerging from a seedy hole-in-ground at odd hours, stumbling out to find that everything is close and resorting to yakitori pork and expired onigiri from the 7-Eleven. It's not a *real* salaryman's experience, but as a tourist-version, it's getting close.

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Random dinner report: Random dinner for tonight at a reputable soba restaurant in downtown Kyoto. The meal was an unusual combination of chili on salmon sashimi with soba and tea. Or that's what the picture looked like. Turns out, it was a spicy raw fish-egg sausage on udon with unidentified legume, and a side of grass soup. Classy, exotic, but nigh on inedible.

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Random robot report: Inside this plush robo-mansion, we met the model-M robot Hemming-San. Unfortunately, he declined to be interviewed.

And if you're feeling stressed this Friday, have a Japanese garden.