It's all well and good to shout down your father-in-law over the so-called "anti-smacking bill", but why can't we debate political issues with people whose views we are not sure of?

Things got a little political at book club the other night. Perhaps it’s another sign of how important this election is, how it is bleeding into our private lives, tainting our family dinner parties and our workplace coffee breaks, and pushing us to drop our polite in-company faces when we overhear something we don’t like at the supermarket. Perhaps it’s a sign of election fatigue and extreme voter fed-up-edness. All I know for sure is I have been in this book club for three years (spread over five) and I have not experienced a moment quite like it.

It was the part of the evening after the first cuppa and before the second, when we choose what to read for the next meeting.

I suggested a thick book I had just got my paws on, The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas, about the aftermath of a suburban barbecue at which a man slaps a child who is not his. It seemed like a perfect reading group discussion book, especially given that nearly every member of our book club is a parent, we are undeniably middle class and therefore have time to get agitated about such issues, and we live in a country that last year passed a piece of legislation known as the “anti-smacking bill”.

The first sally, from a well-read mother of two, was to remind me that the so-called “anti-smacking” bill was actually a bill to repeal Section 59 of the Crimes Act, which included a defence of reasonable force. The legislation championed by Green MP Sue Bradford had been mislabelled by the media, she said, directing her comment at a woman whose husband works for a newspaper.

What it means, added a woman who works in special education, is that parents can no longer do obscene things to their children and claim they were simply trying to discipline them.

What it means, said a politically conservative member of the group, is that politicians are wasting time and resources legislating matters that don’t require their input.

Discussion continued and stalled, there was an uncomfortable moment or two, and the matter was dropped. In the end, we chose not to read The Slap for the next meeting (it had a less than glowing review in Metro, after all—Julia Adams said it was "as subtle as a sledgehammer"), choosing instead a feel-good story about the power of the human spirit and an insider’s guide to Asperger’s.

My theory, constructed hastily in the car on the way home, is that we moved off topic so rapidly because we are not accustomed to talking politics with people whose views we are unsure of. It’s one thing to bitch about Party A and Politician B with people who share your outlook, or with people whose views are antithetical to your own and whose esteem you don’t care to keep. But how awkward when you are plunged into a political debate with no warning and no cheat-sheet on your acquaintances’ thoughts.       

It seems to me that despite the election rumble on the radios, television news, in the blogosphere and in our lounge rooms, we still do not really engage with the other side unless we are confident of what they will say and how we will respond. Is it because we are still basically a polite society and it is considered unseemly to disagree with your host at a book club meeting, or to raise your voice in her lounge? Or is it because we are intellectually lazy?

Why is politics one of the last taboos in polite company—the no-go zone that can make you feel even more uncomfortable than talking about whether you believe in a God, or make $25,000 or $100,000 a year, or secretly think The Hills is a really, really good programme? Why does your view on global warming, or parole terms or Maori representation in Parliament make you fear people won't like you? Is differing opinion so ugly, so gauche?

You'd think so, watching the antics of Rodney Hide and Winston Peters. Peters accuses Hide of "impersonating a canary", Hide calls Peters "a tired old drunk" and we laugh and thank our lucky stars we don't have to face down either one of them. Helen Clark dismisses John Key after the first leaders debate for having "a tantrum". And yes, political theatre is entertaining, if not particularly enlightening. I think our pols should set a better example for political debate, show us how to engage in meaningful discussion about the issues that shape our futures.

Instead, they niggle each other, make outrageous claims, and bore us rigid with points of order. If these former university debaters, these well-versed legislators, many of them former lawyers and academics, can't have a reasoned discussion in Parliament, what hope have we of noodling out our stance on NCEA at a neighbourhood barbecue?

I will never forget visiting the Beehive as a third former in 1987. After viewing the big orangey rug wall-hanging and trouping past Bellamy's, we were allowed into the debating chamber with cautions to be silent. We sat in the public gallery, looking down on a mass of saggy green chairs and saggy adults in suits yelling at each other. I was supremely unimpressed. Former Prime Minister Robert Muldoon, then a backbencher, was so uninterested in proceedings that he turned in his chair and called up to us.

He made a joke, one that I don't think I found particularly amusing at the time and can't remember now, and uttered that famous heh-heh-heh. He was the second "celebrity" I had ever spotted (the first was Adam Rich, that kid from Eight is Enough, who passed through San Francisco International Airport in a flare of flashbulbs) and I was pleased to see him, although disappointed.

I had expected something more.