Get Ready For A Megaparty Of Serious Fun

Serious Funster: Kim Dotcom's ability to mix serious politics with the digital playfulness so defining of the 18-25-year-old age-group raises the possibility of his putative "Megaparty" mobilising a significant number of first-time and/or abstaining voters, thereby, as Fairfax journalist, Vernon Small, put it: "throwing a spanner in the works" of the 2014 General Election.

 

JOHN KEY must be hoping that Kim Dotcom is extradited before the election, because if Dotcom is still here in November there’s every chance that Mr Key’s Government won’t be.

 

Those who make it their business to know what’s going on politically began hearing the rumours more than two months ago. That talk of a Dotcom inspired and funded political party was no longer talk: that action was being taken to make it happen; that high-profile individuals were being approached to take on the public roles required to bring a new political party into existence.

 

These individuals are young, wired and mercifully free of the sort of ideological and historical baggage that connects both National and Labour politicians to the “failed policies of the past”. Dotcom’s “Megaparty” (its working title) will not be about the past, it will be about the future.

 

As a party of the future, Megaparty will appeal mostly to those voters with the most future to appeal to – the young.

 

Its electoral base will be the generation born into the Internet Age: young New Zealanders in their late teens and early twenties; tech savvy, media wise, eager to make their mark but frustrated by an older, Baby-Boom, generation which refuses to make way for those best-placed to deal with the daunting challenges and changes of the digital age.

 

It’s a demographic that is at once aggressively individualistic and touchingly collective: keen to make their personal contribution, but equally eager to share it. A generation which, ideologically-speaking, finds little to connect with in either National or Labour. If these kids vote at all, it is probably for the Greens – but even there the wagging finger of environmental correctness is as likely to offend their anarchic instincts as it is to engage them.

 

Dotcom has already issued a compressed version of the Megaparty’s manifesto – tellingly to the international website/magazine, Vice:

 

“Government is supposed to serve us, the people. We are paying with our taxes [in the expectation] that they do a good job for us. But look what they do: they undermine our rights, they destroy our freedoms, they censor our internet. So we are the ones who have to bring that change.

 

“That is why I get involved in politics because I am f…ing tired of this nonsense and someone has to stand up and change this.”

 

That Mr Dotcom cannot actually stand for election (he is not a New Zealand citizen) will likely make his party more, rather than less, electable. The idea that someone might set up a party for strictly altruistic and politically limited purposes: to roll back the legislative assaults on individual rights and freedoms and preserve the independence of the Internet; will have huge appeal among the young who tend to view the political class in general and professional politicians in particular with withering disdain.

 

The documentary in which Vice News’s Tim Pool talks to Dotcom reveals a man with an unusually powerful grasp on what makes the younger generation sit up and take notice. Pool’s reaction to the larger-than-life Dotcom is equally fascinating. The mansion, the sprawling lawns, the high-tech toys, nothing on the multi-millionaire’s estate is either enviously resented or even slyly denigrated. On the contrary, the young reporter behaves like a child in a toy store and Dotcom shares in his excitement.

 

Business, commerce, capitalism itself: the younger generation doesn’t damn these things as bad in themselves. It’s the evil capitalism enables that they condemn. Like the Bible says: “The love of money is the root of all evil”. Dotcom’s singular gift is his ability to turn money into fun – and then share it.

 

Statistics New Zealand estimate that on 30 June 2013 there were 333,840 New Zealanders aged 20-24 – more than enough to surmount the 5 percent MMP threshold. A huge number of these young people are conveniently concentrated on the nation’s campuses – making the universities and polytechs Megaparty’s prime recruitment sites.

 

It’s even possible that the tightly-packed electorate of Auckland Central, with its tens-of-thousands of young, upwardly-mobile, inner-city apartment-dwellers, might end up being persuaded to guarantee Dotcom’s and Megaparty’s success by electing their (carefully chosen) candidate to Parliament.

 

Impossible?

 

Not when one considers the 1984 success of that other high-profile, beguilingly- roguish, self-made millionaire, Sir Robert Jones. Or the surprise defection of Auckland Central voters from Labour’s Richard Prebble, to the Alliance’s Sandra Lee, back in 1993.

 

Given his history of making the Internet dance to his tune, Dotcom’s political apps and communication strategies are likely to give Megaparty a reach and a level of sophistication that New Zealanders have never before encountered.

 

“Let the masses see your talent and your gifts”, the ebullient German entrepreneur told Vice’s Tim Pool. With the launch of his party in late-January, Kim Dotcom is poised to follow his own advice.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 14 January 2014.

Scapegoating The Young For Alcohol's Harm

Have you all got a note from your parents? Eighteen to twenty-year-old New Zealanders are being scapegoated for their society's problems with alcohol - allowing the real culprits to escape the sort of regulation that would make a real difference.

THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE DEBATE on "What should we do about our drinking problem?" one very important issue has been consistently overlooked.

The constitutional, political and moral objections to "down-sizing" the rights of 18 to 20-year-olds.

Though the Age of Majority Act (1970) sets 20 years as the age at which a New Zealander acquires all the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, over the course of the past four decades Parliament has effectively lowered the Age of Majority to 18 years.

Eighteen and nineteen-year-olds have the right to vote in local and general elections, perform jury service, join the armed forces, make a will, sign a contract, and purchase alcohol. About the only important thing 18 and 19-year-olds can’t do is marry each other without parental consent.

When it comes to the other rights, responsibilities and duties of citizenship, however, 18 and 19-year-old New Zealanders are legally recognised as responsible adults.

This raises a couple of very serious question. Having admitted 18 and 19-year-olds to the ranks of adult New Zealanders, is it constitutionally, politically and morally justifiable to cast them back into the ranks of non-adults when it comes to purchasing alcohol?

How can prohibiting their participation in a social activity in which all other New Zealand adults are free to engage without legal sanction possibly be right?

I would argue that it is neither right nor justifiable. Once specific political and social rights (like the right to vote or the right to purchase alcohol) have been given to a group of citizens they cannot be taken back without placing the rights of every other citizen in jeopardy.

Were the White Americans living in the Deep South justified in stripping their Black neighbours of their civil and political rights in the latter half of the 19th Century? Did the Nazi Government of Germany have the right to strip German Jews of their citizenship in the 1930s?

Both of these cases involved the persecution of a politically friendless minority whose morals, capabilities and behaviour were openly despised and derided by the majority.

It is surely no accident that the alleged failings of young people loom large in the alcohol debate, or that an aggressive rolling-back of their rights is being advanced as the best means of solving the problem. They, too, constitute a vulnerable minority. They, too, have the dubious historical distinction of being their society’s whipping-boy. They, too, have enormous difficulty in mounting an audible defence.

Never mind the glaring absence of hard statistical evidence suggesting that young people are disproportionately responsible for the problems caused by alcohol. And let’s just forget the fact that alcoholism and the damage it causes New Zealand society is a phenomenon more commonly associated with people in their 30s, 40s and 50s.

If the Justice Minister, Simon Power, had been guided by the facts he would have been obliged to fashion an alcohol reform package that struck not at the young and the vulnerable but at the rich and the powerful.

Had Mr Power really wanted to "reduce harm" he’d have gone after the Booze Barons, who market "Ready-to-Drink" lolly-water directly to young women in their late teens and early 20s; the advertisers, whose deadly equation "alcohol = fun" leads so many youngsters astray; and the supermarket owners, whose heavily discounted bottles of plonk are used to "loss-lead" their shoppers into the more profitable aisles.

Raising the excise duty, banning alcohol advertising, restricting the number of outlets and lowering the permissible blood-alcohol level for drivers would have produced an immediate and dramatic reduction in the harm alcohol causes.

But a package which stripped businesses of their economic power would only embroil the National-led Government in a politically counter-productive struggle with its own supporters. As a solution, turning young people into scapegoats has so much more to recommend it.

After all, blacks stay black, and Jews remain Jews, but young people eventually turn into old people who, in their turn, can be persuaded to project all the failings of their own generation on to the next.

That’s why making young people the focus of the alcohol debate is so important. Like all campaigns to restrict the rights of a vulnerable minority, its purpose is to hide the much greater harm done to all of us by an invulnerable minority.

The people who profit by it.

This essay was originally published in The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star on Friday, 27 August 2010.