Is there someone in your life for whom you have trouble choosing a Christmas present?

For instance, someone who professes not to need or want anything, but would be mightily offended if you took them at their word? Or someone who demands flair and inventiveness from gift-givers and packs a sad if they get a book token or toiletries?

Your troubles are over. For a minimum of $250 you can get them a ticket to a champagne lunch at which multi-millionaire Alan Gibbs will outline what he would do if he was dictator for a year.

The event will take place next February at Gibbs' 404ha Kaipara Harbour farm (modestly named The Farm), home to 22 giant sculptures. According to Owen McShane, director of a think-tank that stands to benefit from the fundraiser, the sculptures are priceless and The Farm is comparable to the Tate or Guggenheim. Neither of these claims bears close scrutiny.

My immediate reaction was to wonder why Gibbs, who's reportedly worth $450 million and cruises the seas on his 194-foot yacht Senses, so dislikes our democracy that he fantasises about suspending it for a year.

Traditionally it has been the dispossessed and downtrodden who yearn to overthrow the system.

The fact that Gibbs will be joined in this exercise by Don Brash and Sir Roger Douglas suggests the manifesto which emerges will be more of the free market, small government, devil-take-the-hindmost stuff of which the Ayn Rand, libertarian right is so enamoured.

(The trio are directors of the Centre of Resource Management Studies. The other beneficiary, the Centre for Political Research, is headed by a former Act MP.)

Both outfits seem to regard global warming as a left-wing conspiracy. The Dominion Post described them as independent, presumably in the sense of being privately funded as opposed to non-ideological.

Again, when I remember the New Zealand of my youth and early adulthood, the monochrome, strike-ridden, regulation-bound Romania of the South Pacific, I can't help thinking that this tendency has done pretty well out of democracy in recent times.

The union movement borders on irrelevance, the Labour Party has abandoned any pretence of being socialist, the money markets are a law unto themselves, the accumulation of vast wealth and attendant conspicuous consumption are not merely accepted but admired, and you could sail an ocean-going yacht through the gap between the rich and the plodding, PAYE-taxed middle class.

But it's obviously not enough. The path to a free enterprise nirvana is being blocked by an ignorant, nervous nellie electorate which doesn't know what's good for it and time-serving politicians who mortgage our children's future by bribing their way into office.