by Sam Roggeveen
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15 September 2008 3:25PM
Richard responds to Graeme Dobell's post on the striking similarities between Japanese and New South Wales politics:
The explanatory virtues of this go two ways. To explain Australian federal politics to the Japanese whom I later married, I first described the parties in NSW, since it was easier to explain a system where a party riven by factions aligned itself to rent-seeking interests than to explain a system with pretenses at appealing to a median voter, and where government changed hands. Once I described state Labor in Japanese terms, it was easier to shift to describing federal Labor, and subsequently the anti-Labor blocks of the past century.
Nonetheless, Japanese politics is more entertaining, if only because I need not suffer the consequences.
