RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31224, 23 November 1966, Page 38

RANDOM REMINDER

POLITICAL PLATFORMS

It was just as well that item of news from Moscow was not published until October 7. It came just a bit late for the parties preparing for the New Zealand election to do much about it; a few weeks earlier, and it might have been a temptation. In Russia, it is now possible to spend three years in gaol for telling a political joke. This is one of the penalties for “spreading of deliberately false fabrications defaming the Soviet State and social structure.”

You don’t even have to write it; you may be in the wrong sort of cell, or on the way to a power station in Siberia, for merely making the joke, orally. It is to be hoped that the election campaign which ends on Friday will not be the last in which the voters are free to make political jokes about political jokers. Being required to give earnest consideration to the claims of one party, that there are now more cars, cows and cash, and to the reply of the other vintage, bull and petty can be pretty dull stuff.

They resolutely refuse to take the lead of American politicians, who go about accompanied by gospel singers, or jazz bands, or drum majorettes, or sometimes, it is believed, by the lot of them. In New Zealand, there seems to be a particular need for the revivalists. And a jazz band would certainly be welcome if it helped cut short an address on the rival party's part in the unhappy incidence of pulpy kidney. At the average political meeting, even a dumb majorette would be an asset