KEY POINTS:
Look, when you've had a blazing row with Catherine Zeta-Jones and she's stormed out, taking the cocaine and the ermine handcuffs with her, there's not a lot you can do in a hotel room at three in the morning except, perhaps, the very thing you should have been
doing when you were arguing with the wilful wench.
So we'll write the flaming column! Okay? No matter that sleep deprivation will likely imbue it with a hallucinatory strangeness, or that it's a considerable challenge making pertinent comment about what's afoot in Outer Roa when you've spent the past 72 hours in Sydney!
Anyone who's been in Australia for any length of crime will know they don't take much notice of New Zillun over here. We simply don't feature to any discernible extent.
Oh, there was a piece on TV the other night about the Aussie premiere of that psycho sheep movie Violence of the Lambs, but the reporter was obviously rooting for the cannibal Coopworths rather than the endangered Kiwis.
And that's it, cobber. Apart from that, NZ info has been as hard to find as water in the Murray, darling.
There's been plenty of stories devoted to the appalling tribulations of that stroppy sheila who got grilled by the US police after saying "Fair dinkum!" to a flight attendant but nothing about the equally brusque treatment meted out to poor old Dick Hubbard when he used the words "feared income" to describe his council's rate increases.
Equally, while the media's been transfixed by the tragic tale of this kidnapped Ocker cocky and his fruitless search for someone to love, they haven't been the least bit interested in Mr Hone Harawira's equally fruitless search for someone to loath.
But here's the truly surprising thing about this manifest neglect. Once you get over the initial shock of being dropped into an information void, you actually don't mind being there. In fact, you find you're quite relieved to be free of the endless angst of New Zealand public life, albeit only briefly.
Treasonous as this may sound, it actually feels good! In this case, distance lends detachment to the view so that, for example, when viewed from afar, this week's artistic contretemps over the Queen St light/water/sculpture thing appears in an entirely new light.
Observing the dust-up from Sydney, you find yourself forgetting all the standard "Bah! Humbug!" harrumphing about the council spending $250,000 on this exceptionally linear pavement piece and saying instead (with a slight Aussie drawl) "Well, good on yiz! If yiz is gunna spend other people's money, then yiz moit as well spend it on sumfing seely!"
Which this footpath thingamegig does appear to be. Let's face it, only someone as rigid as an urban planner could ever imagine that 3 military-straight 3m lengths of glass would adequately evoke the meandering course of the lost Horotiu Stream.
Not that it matters much. The main thing is we can worry about the cost of it and the look of it and the need for it and that's what really counts.
We enjoy worrying. It makes us happy as a duty should. We consider worry a measure of merit and token of virtue and, hence, devote much time and effort to it.
As does that small army of strict and abstemious persons paid to worry on our behalf and continually remind us of those things we ought not to be doing.
But things seem different o'er the ditch, where there's worriers aplenty as well, of course, sticking frightening photos on the fags and such, and urban planners, too. It's just that they don't appear to be quite so central to the social equation.
Underlying everything, there's a larriken exuberance to life in Australia that seems to either transcend worry or put it in perspective.
The censure of the puritans rings less-loudly in the ear, as do the entreaties of the politicians.
Important they may be but John Howard and Kevin Rudd both seem distant, remote; two muffled salesmen on the other side of double-glazed French doors, their clamour barely audible.
Politics simply isn't the dominant, overbearing, centre-stage fact of life that it is in New Zillun.
Fair dinkum! Those Aussie politicians are even letting other people speak their minds.
No bull! Just weeks away from a general election and all manner of people are saying all manner of things in all manner of media.
There's groups supporting workplace reform. Groups opposing it. Groups demanding immediate action on global warming, and groups that couldn't give a fat rat's nether regions.
All part of a blunt, robust "pay as you say" public forum by the public, for the public.
Fortunately, that's one thing we won't have to worry about, thanks to the gummint's electoral reforms. With an election next year, after January 1, no one will be able to lobby, argue, contest or promote any issue that is a matter of Party policy.
Only the Party will be allowed to talk about such important matters. And, of course, we will be allowed to listen.
Jeez, if those fractious Aussies would just quit their privately funded political squabbling for a minute and pay us a little overdue attention they might finally realise that, in a truly civilised society, free speech and no speech are one and the same.
