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Smear campaigns, law suits and behaviour more at home in a pre-school playground have shown just how poorly our local body politicians really perform under pressure.

But the latest move should sound a worrying note of warning to Net users.

Encumbent mayor John Banks, has already shown his contempt for the law before - having been caught using a his cellphone on a commercial flight a few years ago and now he's engaged in another act that I hope will soon be made illegal.

His zeal for ignoring the rules the rest of us must live by has now manifested itself in the form of spam arriving in some people's mailboxes.

According to this story in today's NZ Herald, Banks initiated this spamming by asking a "few friends" to pass on an email message in which he pleads for votes.

Of course Mr Banks could quite rightly say that it was not he who spammed but simply a few well-meaning supporters.

This raises an interesting point that those who are drafting our anti-spam laws might want to consider very carefully: is inciting someone to spam as bad (or worse) a crime as actually spamming?

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There are endless instances where "marketers" set up affiliate schemes offering clueless Net users a commission on sales of their products, in the full knowledge that many of those Net users will use spam as a sales tool.

When they receive complaints about spam promoting those products, they simply say "wasn't me, it was an affiliate and we've dealt with them" -- which often means simply assigning the offender a new affiliate number.

For this reason, I strongly urge our legislators to consider the act of incitement to be as bad as (or worse than) the actual act of spamming.

Just one of these unscrupulous marketers can end up inciting dozens (or even thousands) of senseless dupes to start firing off spam and then, if the laws aren't well designed, those marketers will be able to stand back and deny any legal responsibility. Do we really want that situation?

But it's not just marketers is it?

I wonder how many of our central government politicians (or would-be politicians) will think that Mr Banks' idea was a great one and also encourage their "few friends" to pass on messages begging for votes around election time next year?

Of course you and I know that such a tactic is likely to backfire badly -- but, as John Banks has clearly demonstrated, most politicians really aren't really the sharpest knives in the drawer.

I can make this claim with some degree of authority in the wake of events reported yesterday. It seems that even though your aged grandmother can negotiate her way around a mail client, George Hawkins (or his staff) are obviously finding it a real challenge. Apparently, due to a "technical fault", they sent out an "automated" email this week to a long list of addresses belonging to almost everyone who'd ever contacted the minister.

They claim they can run a country but they can't operate a PC?

We're all doomed I tell you! :-)

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