On a road trip described in Joe Bennett’s book “A Land of Two Halves”, he is puzzled by this road sign on the edge of the Waipoua Forest: “Watch out for kiwis”.

“Do the signmakers imagine that if it were not for the sign I would run the birds down?” Joe wonders. “And if it so happened that I was a committed runner-down-of- kiwis, do they imagine that the sign would dissuade me?”

There is a Master’s thesis waiting to be written on the assumptions that various signmakers hold about  people like us –the ones they are trying to educate and persuade.

Road sign writers would be the most obvious group to begin with. I imagine them as kindly and sensibly dressed public servants who spend their time in a back office dreaming up stunningly simple slogans like “Drive to the conditions” or even more irritating, “100km – it’s not a target”.

Try telling that to the line of cars stacked up behind a slow driver. Such signs treat motorists as slightly stupid and dependent on someone to tell them how to drive.

But it would take a Ph.D dissertation to unravel just who bloggers think they’re talking to. And especially the bloggers (and exposers of bloggers) involved in the  pollution washed up by the Nicky Hager’s publication of “Dirty Politics”.

There are no clean hands in this affair. Hager’s revelations are based on emails that fell off the back of a truck, as it were.

But if his information, however ambiguously obtained, proves to be reliable, then our leaders seem to have been treating us as very stupid people.   

Hager’s targets brand him as a left-wing conspirator and tell us to dismiss his book as hearsay, slander and make-believe.

I couldn’t help but recall the furore over Peter Jackson’s early TV mockumentary  called “Forgotten Silver” which fooled the nation for a couple days into believing evidence of an early civilisation hidden in the West Coast bush. I can remember being angry at the time for being taken in, before discovering the joke.

 However you rate it, Hager’s book is not a joke that will disappear. Whether you are left or right, Hager exposes a nasty slump in the standard of public discourse in New Zealand, far beyond these weeks of an election that brings out the worst in us.

Once upon a time, politicians and public servants patronised us, but still knew their bread and butter depended on treating the public with a modicum of respect.

The current climate reveals some very different assumptions about the voting public. The technology involved now is light years on, but the web of bloggers, media spin doctors and PR strategists (and the politicians of all shades who rely on them) are all bound by a primitive belief that the public they seek to sway are naïve, gullible and as impressionable as children. Respect for the dignity of voters is hard to find.

Already there are signs of kickback to this cynical and contemptuous treatment. The polls are showing public withdrawal and distrust across the political process. Strategists in all parties will need to tread carefully in these last weeks, for fear of adding to that alienation. They need to ask themselves all over again, “Who do we think we’re talking to?”

The billboards, blogs and ads that answer that question carefully and respectfully will pay big dividends at the ballot box. Where we feel we’re being treated as people with dignity, intelligence and choice, we respond positively.

I like the ad sponsored by the New Zealand Aged Care Association that lists the political parties willing to move caregivers’ wages from $15.31 to $17.50 an hour. (Six parties do, one doesn’t.) Then it simply says, “Use your vote wisely.”

These caregivers might be looking after you one day. You choose.

More of that sort of respectful engagement would lower the pollution level in the tank of dirty political water  sloshing about right now.

Imagine a similar approach to the caregivers’ ad that listed facts and posed policy choices on child poverty, family violence and even, just dream for a moment, a willingness to work collaboratively across parties on key (lower case) survival issues.

When election campaigns stop feeding peanuts and treating voters like monkeys, we’ll start responding like the people of worth and dignity we think we are.

After all, some of us dare to believe we are made in the image of God.

Bishop John Bluck lives in Pakiri, Wellsford.

bluck@vodafone.co.nz