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A senior Australian politician who once ended up handcuffed to a stripper's pole in a Russian nightclub while wearing only his underpants said Wednesday it was a "terrific" night out.
Senator Nigel Scullion, 51, the new deputy leader of the conservative Nationals party which was in a coalition government until elections last month, was responding to a tabloid newspaper's expose of the incident.
He told Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio he had learnt two important lessons from the experience: "Don't let anyone handcuff you to a post and make sure you always wear clean underwear."
Scullion was leading an Australian delegation to a global fisheries conference in 1998, three years before becoming a senator, when he and some "lunatic fishermen from Newfoundland" went to the St Petersburg strip club.
At some stage during the evening he was dragged onto the stage, handcuffed to a strippers' pole and stripped to his underwear, he told the national broadcaster.
Asked if he was "pretty drunk", Scullion replied: "We all were, yeah, indeed."
He said he was not ashamed of the escapade.
"I don't spend a lot of time sort of hanging around sleazy strip joints in Russia," he said.
"It's unfortunate that people would see that as a very bad thing. This was 10 years ago and I was a fisherman. Everybody has a colourful past.
"It was a terrific night, it really was. If you ever get an offer to go drinking with Icelandic whalers and Canadian crab fishermen, take them up on it."
The senator's night out ended when a fight broke out between Russian sailors and other patrons and he was forced to flee.
News of the incident comes after Australia's new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was exposed as having paid a drunken visit to a strip club in New York several years ago.
Newspaper coverage of his escapade broke during the election campaign, but far from putting pay to his career, it gave the bookish leader a bit of a boost in the opinion polls and he was sworn in as prime minister last week.
