KEY POINTS:
Just like Kevin Rudd and John Key, I've visited strip clubs before. It was a long time ago, and it was for work, not pleasure. Honestly, Your Honour.
The first time was in Hamilton, to cover the debut tour of the Australian all-male revue Manpower. This was a
choreographed, song-and-dance routine that saw the lads get down to G-strings and then the lights came down. No dangly bits, no offence taken and the wild women of the Waikato loved it.
One poor sod who drew the short straw had to wander through the crowd of tanked-up women and ended up with three fake fingernails stuck into his bum but when I interviewed the boys later, they said that was just an occupational hazard.
My second visit was to a strip club on Courtenay Place during the Nissen Mobil 500. This was one that catered to men, a gentleman's club in Rudd parlance - and it appears men's and women's tastes run to different things.
There was no real performance - the girls just wound themselves round poles, did the splits, and bent over backwards.
I remember them as being very flexible - certainly their old gym teachers would have been proud - but they weren't performers. There was no discernible routine and they didn't appear to be terribly enthusiastic about what they were doing.
And the men weren't sitting back, watching and appreciating. The men at the club appeared to be more interested in drinking and talking with one another than drooling over the girls.
Although there are plenty of men who've been to strip shows, it seems there are just as many who have not.
A young sound technician rang me on talkback this week to say that not only would he never darken the door of such a club as a paying guest, he has also refused to work at strip clubs.
He says the girls are objectified and dehumanised by the process of stripping and he believes the industry shouldn't be supported because it's bad for society.
He'd have a friend in Helen Clark, because she made it very clear this week that she didn't approve of the whole process.
But many callers have pointed out a seeming paradox - this thin-lipped disapproval is from a woman who helped to decriminalise prostitution.
The furore over Kevin Rudd's visit to the euphemistically titled "gentlemen's club" in New York four years ago appears to have backfired on the Aussie Government.
Rudd handled it perfectly. For a start, he'd told on himself to his wife the day after his drunken visit, so he didn't have battles to fight on two fronts. He was safe domestically so he had only to concentrate on the professional realm.
Then he mea culpa-ed and mea culpa-ed and mea culpa-ed some more, and it appears that rank-and-file Aussies love him for it.
The general feeling appears to be that most Aussie blokes wouldn't have thought the speccy little pointy head had it in him, so good on ya, mate.
Sensing the way the political wind was blowing, John Key confessed to having visited a couple of strip joints years ago in his days as a wild crazy money marketeer, no doubt hoping to attain some of that edginess that Kevin Rudd seems to have gained.
Boy-next-door cuteness and aw-shucks niceness will take a politician only so far.
The Greens in Australia brought some perspective to the issue. Four years ago, the Greens' leader said, Rudd got drunk and took himself to a strip club. Four years ago, however, a sober John Howard took Australia into the Iraq war. They asked the Australian electorate to decide who had done the more harm.
The young man I spoke to who was so vehemently against strip clubs said that the clubs were the thin end of the wedge.
If you accept that strip clubs are okay, then what more do you accept? How low do you go?
I think the real danger would be to make them forbidden. Most people who go along only do so once or twice. Why go and pay to look at girls you can't have when you can look all you like at the one you have at home?
They appear to be the domain of men who want an alpha male night out - and a touch of the alpha males doesn't seem to do politicians any harm at all.