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  AGENDA, 17 SEPTEMBER American political commentator Larry Beinhart discusses the rise of political spin. We cross the ditch, where former Australian Labour leader Mark Latham has published his explosive Diaries; Australian journalist Bernie Lagan and Sky News' political editor David Spears assess the fallout. And at home, TVNZ Decision '05 executive producer Richard Harman previews the channel's revolutionary election-night technology. We also speak with former MPs Bob Tizard and Paul East, about their election experiences.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Firstly as New Zealanders cast their votes across the country, 69 electorates today, it's the job of the Chief Electoral Office to make sure that everything goes smoothly. David Henry is the Chief Electoral Officer and he's with us live from the Thorndon School polling booth in Wellington, welcome to the programme Mr Henry. How does election day unfold for the Chief Electoral Officer? DAVID HENRY – Chief Electoral Officer SIMON What in essence are your legal obligations? MR HENRY To make sure that the election is conducted according to the law and to make sure it's both accurate and timely in relation to the results. SIMON Tell us a little bit about the numbers and logistics that are involved on election day. MR HENRY Well there are about 16,000 people working today in the 2700 polling places and we're expecting probably about 2.3, 2.4 million voters to turn out today. So it's a fairly large exercise. SIMON How many people working, how many volunteers and how many employed? MR HENRY There are 16,000 temporary employees working today. SIMON What in terms of your role are the most difficult aspects to manage, is it remote polling booths? MR HENRY It's really a question of logistics, making sure that everyone is trained and carries out the procedures to the letter, and to do that we have a very good training programme but by definition since most people are just doing it for either the first time, or the first time for three years, it is quite a challenge to make sure everybody does exactly the same thing. SIMON What happens with complaints? MR HENRY We have a complaint service at the returning officer's headquarters that’s the 69 returning officers and we also have one in central Wellington, we've had a couple already this morning about election material being delivered, or apparently delivered on election day, that’s fairly routine for this time. SIMON What about complaints about process at booths etc. Can complaints be made at the booth, at polling booths. MR HENRY If you wish to make a complaint at the polling place then you should see the polling place manager and they will register the complaint and we will either deal with it on the spot or if we can't we'll deal with it later. SIMON What's the process once polls close at 7 o'clock? MR HENRY At 7 o'clock the door will close, any voters left inside will still be given a vote and once we've got rid of them then we can start to open the ballot boxes and start the count. Now in each polling place, for example this one is issuing votes for Wellington Central and also the Maori electorate of Tautaitonga so it will count the votes for both of those electorates and then it will telephone those results to the Returning Officer for Wellington Central, she will put them into the computer system and that system will display those results to the world, to the media and to the website. SIMON Via the website, so if the world wants to know from via something other than television where can they check? MR HENRY They can go electionresults.govt.nz and that is within two minutes of the results being entered it will be shown there. SIMON And that will be the first source available? MR HENRY That’s probably the fastest source available, and it will also show you the calculations of the various parties, how they're doing for both list and electorate as it goes along. SIMON Tell us, when do you reasonably expect an accurate forecast to be available? MR HENRY A forecast of results? I'm expecting that the advance vote results, that’s people who have voted over the last two weeks will be out and on that system by 8.30 and that the polling places around the country, the 2700 half of them will have reported by 10 o'clock and the other half by 11.30, that’s if everything goes well and according to plan of course. SIMON Here's hoping. Chief Electoral Officer David Henry, thank you so much for making time.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SIMON American author Larry Beinhart was in New Zealand this week to promote his latest novel, a political satire called 'The Librarian'. It's by no means his first foray into the genre, Beinhart's also the author of 'American Hero' which was later made into the film 'Wag the Dog'. I spoke to Larry Beinhart earlier this week and began by asking him to what extent the film was based on real life. LARRY The film version Wag the Dog was based on Gulf War I and George Bush the first. The film version got made like four to six years later and by then Clinton was President so they took a whole different spin on it, but the idea of the book was that the real war was directed by a TV director or a movie director as a movie that Americans could love on television as a war, but in the movie it's a pretend war, we're saying that the real war was staged in a way that the American public would love it. SIMON Do you think that the lines are becoming blurred as a result of this life imitating art? LARRY I think the lines between life and art are more than blurred, I think what we see in television as reality is fiction, and what I've been trying to do in my fiction is turn that inside out and say okay this is cold fiction but it's more like the real reality than the stuff they feed you on television. SIMON Just how spun by their politicians are Americans? LARRY Well, can a war on terror be real? I mean this has to be the most bogus event in human history. We have spent what is it now – 200 billion dollars presumably to avenge ourselves on a single guy and we haven’t caught him. Can you imagine being given 200 billion dollars to search for one man and not be able to find him? SIMON So you have a conceptual war, a war on a concept? LARRY A war on a concept? How can you have a war on a concept? You know what happened in America is many years ago we have a war on poverty, and that was followed by a war on crime, and a war on drugs, a war on marijuana, there was even a war on masturbation, and so we got used to this phrase a war on, and so when George Bush came along and said we're gonna have a war on terror, I don’t think anybody actually realised there was gonna be a real war inside it. So everybody said sure we'll do that, we'll do a war – cos we have war-on’s all the time, so to unspin things what you have to do is you have to come up with two words, right you have war for the real thing where you go kill people and women and children die from the bombs, and you have war-ons for the you know maximum effort with lots of publicity, and then George Bush could say you know like I've got a real war-on for Saddam Hussein, or I'm a war-on president instead of I'm a war president. SIMON What's the media's role Larry, are they buyers or sellers of this spin? LARRY There's an institutional problem with objective journalism and in America in particular we've learned to take advantage of that. The institutional problem is rather than a reporter saying I know what the truth is and if you're lying to me I'm gonna call you out on it, a reporter can only say if you tell me that story I'll go to another guy and he'll tell me the other story and I'll put the two stories next to each other and the readers will have to decide, but if you don’t have the other side then only one side gets told, but George Bush got to tell you his story ten thousand times, that’s an exaggeration five thousand times, and because of his status you have to report it each time he says it. So the whole world is convinced that there's a war on terror, that there were weapons of mass destruction and that he has some sort of honest intention to save the world for democracy. SIMON So an uncontradicted assertion just becomes a de facto truth? LARRY Exactly, and in this situation in this war on terrorism, in order to contradict it you had to take the position of being a traitor or being accused of being a traitor, and Democrats in particular because of their brand identification as the party of peace comparatively, even though the Democrats have fought the Vietnam War and brought you World War II but they're branded as the party of peace, so they're very terrified of taking an anti war stance, and so that’s why Kerry got himself so stuck in this situation where all he could say was well I'll fight the war bigger and better than you. SIMON How do you think the rest of the western world compares to America when it comes to spin? LARRY America's way ahead in spin. The creation of spin comes from money, the guys who invented spin are not politicians they're corporations and PR people, and they’ve learned to package truth and – they're very bright people, they're very smart people and they charge a lot of money for it and then they took those techniques and they brought them into politics. Now America's probably the most corporatised country in the world, so that’s probably the reason why we lead in this area, but I'm beginning to see parties in Australia and New Zealand using the same pushbutton words that we use in the United States to move the electorate. SIMON Words that are proven to have a direct effect? LARRY Exactly. If you watch George Bush you'll notice that he says nothing of substance, he only uses emotionally loaded words. We have comedy shows in the States, the Daily Show with John Stewart and he'll frequently take a Bush speech and just take out all the 9/11s or the terrorisms and so you get a speech with George Bush going 9/11. 9/11, 9/11, terrorism, terrorism, terrorism, you know and that’s in the essence of what he does. SIMON Hot button words. LARRY Hot button words, no content, no specifics and it works. I have to say – I think I can get away with saying this, from what little bit I saw of this election campaign journalists here were not letting politicians get away with it the way they get away with it in the United States, they were actually arguing back, speaking back and saying you know you are on the record as having said something else I won't let you evade the question, you have to answer the question, could you please stick to the topic and not offer me some spin, and I was delighted to see that there was a country where people were still doing that. SIMON We try our best. LARRY No I mean I was genuinely impressed, you have no idea how bad especially the national press is in the United States and that includes the icon of the United States media which is the New York Times and CBS. SIMON As you know Australian politician John Brogden recently attempted suicide after being pilloried for what was appalling drunken behaviour but what I want to know is, how would that affair have played out in American politics? LARRY You guys will like this story about Bill Clinton. Newt Gingrich was attacking Bill Clinton and Bill Clinton said don’t you know who I am, I'm that blow up doll you had when I was a kid, the harder you hit me the quicker I bounce back, and American politics especially in recent years is a blood sport in which we have negative advertising and we have people trying to find out what the worst thing you’ve ever done in your life is, both politically and personally and then trying to slander you with it, so if you want to be a successful politician a large part of your job is standing up to that, smiling and ignoring it and pretending it never happened. SIMON Given the criticism over the delays in federal response to Hurricane Katrina how do you think George Bush should spin it? LARRY I hope he can't. You know I think Katrina exposes to a large degree what the Bush administration is about, these guys never believed in governing, they look at government as a way to take money from ordinary people and give it to rich people, and that’s its purpose and that’s its function, and if you actually examine the policies of what the Bush administration has done, that’s what they’ve done, and they put spin on top of it but that’s what the policies actually are. So it never occurred to them that they had a job to do like protect New Orleans or rescue the people there or manage the wetlands so that hurricanes would be slowed down when they came in from the sea. SIMON How hurt do you think he'll be by the flak over the hurricane response? LARRY I think he's gonna be very very hurt, because there's no enemy, there's no way to take this and say 9/11 9/11, there's no way to say terrorist, terrorist, terrorist, what's he gonna say God, God, God, God sent the hurricane, I'm gonna go fight God, he can't say that, he can't say he's gonna fight nature, there's nobody to go bomb. SIMON Larry Beinhart thank you so much for making the time to appear on Agenda.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SIMON We are counting down to the opening of the polls. Election day of course represents the culmination of weeks months even years of work for politicians and political candidates. For some there's the euphoria of victory and for others the disappointment of defeat. Between them former MPs Bob Tizard and Paul East contested almost 20 elections and they're with us now to share their experiences. Welcome to you both. Before we go to your memories though you just saw that piece from Larry Beinhart on American spin, how pervasive is spin in New Zealand politics? BOB Well when I started it wasn’t, the Prime Minister had a bit of secretarial staff and he had one secretary who did some writing for him, but when Norm Kirk took over in 72 he had a press officer and I was just trying to remember talking with Paul whether Hugh Watt his deputy had one, but the rest of us as ministers didn’t. SIMON You were all on your own just the Prime Minister had one. BOB Yeah well worse than that. My Director General of Health went off and died without permission the day I took over so I didn’t even have a head of department. SIMON What an effect you had Bob. Paul how did it evolve? PAUL Well I was there when it did change I think Simon and it was through the early 80s I think, through the 80s predominantly, each minister had a press secretary, a lot of those press secretaries came from the parliamentary press gallery and I think that was a kind of slightly concerning relationship that on one day a journalist could be writing for one of the national papers or some other part of the media and within a week or two in a minister's office selling the message of the government, but it's here to stay now and there are some beneficial aspects in terms of getting out amongst the public what the government of the day might be up to, but it certainly has been an enormous change from the time that Bob and perhaps when I started as well. It changed also in the structure of the ministers' offices, there's now far more people employed close to the minister and other relationships rather than the core public service which was the old system wasn’t it Bob? BOB The principal secretary was always a permanent appointee in my time in 72 but now I don’t think there more than two or three of them left for the whole cabinet. SIMON But back in your day you were required to do the spin yourself, was there spin at all or did you just go with honesty? BOB Well as they say there's lies and damn lies and it depended on your own success. PAUL We always went with honesty Bob it was the others. BOB No no you went with honest if nothing else worked. SIMON What effect did the advent of television have, did that really cause people to sit up and take notice? BOB Oh yes, you had to be instantaneous, prior to that there were such things as arguing about whose turn it was to speak on the night air so you could be on radio and you had time to think, but with television you got a response and if you so much as hesitated they commented on that. PAUL And I think also it changed in terms of some politicians who were very good at television and might not have been so good in other areas of their portfolio, some people were very good ministers, very good politicians, did a great job that were hopeless on television, it was a little unkind in that regard. SIMON And it continues for much of the population to judge a politician on how they come across. BOB Anyone whose got a stammer it's exaggerated on television and you think he's dodgy. SIMON So any weakness will be exposed, and has training evolved to take that into account? BOB To a degree but when pressure comes on training tends to go out the window. SIMON Just gonna take a break now, we're about 15 seconds to the opening of polling on this momentous election, so we're going across to the Thorndon School polling booth again to see the opening, and there is someone waiting to cast the first vote of course. Six seconds here we go coming up to 9.00 am. Polling booth managers and officers are opening and we are under way for Decision 05. Exercising their democratic rights, the most motivated at 9.00 am ready to go, people with a busy day possibly in front of them. Alright we're underway, back with our former politicians of course Paul East and Bob Tizard. Do you remember your first election campaign as a candidate, what was it like? BOB Well mine was very brief it was three weeks in the 1951 snap election and on the Friday I was lecturing at Auckland University and on Friday night I rang the electorate president and said hey George we've gotta get a candidate, no he said you're it, and I became the candidate for Remuera, I argued more or less for three weeks, I got a hiding on the Saturday, and I went back to university as if nothing had happened on the following Monday. SIMON Great character building stuff. Paul? PAUL Pretty much 1978 was my first election when I stood as a candidate and I've gotta say in those days it was a different situation – first of all today all of these people that are candidates today or a great number of them don’t have to fear about winning or losing their electorate seat as to what they're gonna be doing on Monday because many of them will be members of parliament because of the MMP system we now have. Very different in the days when Bob and I were there, I was there during the transition to MMP but certainly particularly I was always in a marginal seat, in fact Rotorua and Whangarei were the only two provincial city seats that stayed with one party right from 1960 but they were always marginal and as a result you were very apprehensive about what might happen on the day, so you left no stone unturned, but today you know that if you miss out in your electorate seat well you're likely to come swinging back in on the party list, for a reasonable number. BOB In my own case I lost the 1960 election after the win in 57. Your pay stopped on election day. I had a wife and four children, and not a cent coming in. If I wanted to go back to university I had no show there'd been two appointments in the history department three weeks before the election so I couldn’t apply for those jobs, it was a confession of defeat if I did, and I finished up driving a van for a friend who was building the sand sorting plant down at Meremere and I found myself hanging from steel girders and so on 90ft above the ground, thank God I had a bit of a head for heights, but that’s what I did until school opened in February and my first pay came in on the 28th of February. SIMON Great way to get in touch with the people again though of course. Now they’ve been telling me some story about an umbrella. BOB Oh yes that was the 51 election. I had a school teacher at Meadowbank School in Standard 4 and she had a very strong political feeling, her husband had been badly gassed in the first world war but she was the support for the family and they were going to dump her during the slump because she was a married woman and an edict came out that in order to make jobs widely spread married teachers women were not going to be employed, so she had very strong political views and she turned up at my meeting in the Remuera Library Hall, and as a change to the custom we had it on a Sunday night at 8 o'clock, 8 o'clock because it was after the church service and Sunday night because we didn’t think that the National opponents would turn up to a Labour meeting in the Remuera Hall which was their main booth. Well a bunch of my mates from university came along and proceeded to have a go at me and old Maggie Clark was up in the front row and it was a wet showery night and the chairman lost control, in fact he'd arrived half tight and he went to sleep and stretched out with his feet showing out under the table and he wasn’t even wearing socks. So the meeting tended to degenerate, with the shouting at the back until finally old Maggie stood up and she was about 4ft 9 I spose full upright and she charged down the hall and she said I've had enough of you if you can't be quiet get out and whack- hit him across the back and the neck with her umbrella, I said hang on Mrs Clark he's a mate of mine. He didn’t act like it, she said, she was a firm believer in corporal punishment and it never left her. SIMON Gentlemen now you're no longer at the coalface of politics do you still get the adrenalin rush on election day? PAUL Well it's still an exciting time and we'll be watching Bob and I I'm sure very closely and this one particularly if we're allowed to say that much, this is one which is very hard for anybody to call so it's going to be a very exciting night that we're all in for, but I have no desire to get back, I don’t know about Bob, the whole scene of politics is changed, MMP changed it markedly and the type of member of parliament very different from our day. When I first came into parliament the MPs, Bob was very typical of them, there were many second world war returned veterans, they'd all made their mark in some other form of career before they were in parliament, many of them we're products of the depression and the second world war which I think in some way coloured the manner and policies in which we conducted business. But having said that they were people that you'd always have enormous respect for within what you'd known they'd contributed to the community. Today I think we see more and more people who have been involved in politics from a much younger age, they perhaps haven’t had the outside experience. SIMON But a greater breadth of representation nevertheless. PAUL Oh yes, certainly it's a much more representative house I have to say, there's certainly that. BOB Well I think what Paul is saying I'd have to agree with, most of the people that came in before me and even up to my time had already made their own character and status before they came into parliament, now a lot come in and parliament makes them. SIMON Absolutely. Paul East, Bob Tizard it's been a real pleasure having you on the programme and thank you for coming in I'm sure you're looking forward to the rest of the day as much as the rest of us.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SIMON Next week sees the release of former Australian Labour Party Leader Mark Latham's political memoirs based on the diaries he kept during his time in opposition. The book's highly critical of his former party colleagues. Entitled The Latham Diaries he writes 'politics can be a dirty business but our caucus is infested with the sewer rats of the Labour movement'. With me now to discuss the political impact of the book we have David Spears, Political Editor for Sky News Australia and live from Sydney Bernard Lagan, author of the Latham Biography, Loner. Welcome to you both gentlemen. 'My commitment to the Labour cause was destroyed by the bastardry of others,' he calls them sewer rats, and he calls his foreign affairs spokesman terribly piece of work addicted to the media and leaking, and that’s just some of it. Bernie it's just been two months since your highly controversial biography of Latham was printed and he's at it again. Just how deep does his bitterness run? BERNIE Well it surprised me, I thought the depth had been probably reached with my book but he's ratcheted up a few notches here, I think particularly the attack on Kim Beazley in Diaries is the one that is most galling for people, he has you know accused Beazley of all sorts of things including spreading for six years rumours about Latham's sexual harassments which you know it hasn’t been proven but he said it did happen. I think what this is doing is just reminding Australians that it was the Labour Party that put Latham where he is and I think that’s the big downside for the Labour Party as a whole. SIMON I do want to come to that in a minute but you talk about that attack on Kim Beazley. Kim Beazley still managed to in the run up to the election last November, still managed to get in behind him and he could play the party politics, it smacks of a man Mark Latham having an ego, a huge ego. BERNIE Well there's that, I think there's also something deeper here, I mean Mark was a child who was terribly terribly bright and one of his sisters once said to me it was like having a champion swimmer in the family, we all rallied around him, we devoted our lives to him, and I think in some ways Mark never really has known defeat until now and I think that may be why he has such difficulty admitting that he made any mistakes at all during the election campaign and indeed why he blames others. SIMON Let me come to David Spears. Peter Botsman the ALP historian said on Thursday night on ABC 7.30 report 'the thing people conclude is how did we ever vote for this guy to be leader in the first place, and how did he get so far in the Labour Party when he acts in such an irresponsible and immature way.' DAVID Yeah I think that’s quite right as Bernie says this is going to be the most damaging thing for the Labour Party now is that they were the ones who put him there, they're the ones that he's associated with, he's now turned on them in a big way but it's certainly causing reflection on what's wrong with the Labour Party that it put a bloke like that in the leadership, and it's also created a huge distraction for them in a week where the sale of Telstra finally passed the parliament and that should have been a huge opportunity for Labour to whack the government around the head, it's been unable to do that, every Labour MP that puts their head up now is simply questioned about Mark Latham so it's not helping them on many levels. SIMON It was said that the ALP was in terminal decline before all this but Mark Latham also says 'the ALP's massive cultural and structural problems are insoluble' – what's he really talking about? DAVID Well I don’t know if they're insoluble but they certainly do have massive problems in not so much these days in the factions although they are a problem, but you’ve got this enormous hangover of the leadership battles of the past few years that saw Simon Creen emerge and then be dumped and then Mark Latham and the various battles he had with Kim Beazley, it really has split the caucus into a lot of warring camps between those who still remain loyal to the Creen Latham leadership days and those who've remained loyal throughout to Kim Beazley, and there really is deep animosity between the MPs and between front benchers that still exists today. SIMON It also smacks of problems at the time of his leadership. Bernie, The Australian said yesterday, The Australian newspaper, 'it's one thing to try to limit the damage of the Labour Party now and react with disappointed sorry to Latham's allegations, but it's entirely another matter to neglect to mention that this apprehension and evidence of Latham's inability to lead were apparent while he was leader of the Australian Labour Party.' BERNIE Well that’s true to an extent but we have to remember that when Mark became leader they were doing very very poorly, in fact their own research said that under Simon Creen the previous leader they could have lost 20 to 30 seats in the election campaign, Mark Latham took them to heights in the polls that they had no right to expect to be in a short time, there's no question he electrified politics for the period he was leader last year, people were listening to him, the party was right behind him, he staked out new ground for the party which they didn’t expect to have, he did very very well for quite a long period as leader. It came unstuck I really think in the last couple of weeks of the campaign so certainly the vote was close when they put him in as leader. I like to think that he was kind of like the Prince Hell in Shakespeare's Henry IV, you know the bar room brawler who once he rose into politics grew into the job, I think that’s what people thought had hoped was going to happen, it didn’t happen. SIMON He complains about the machine, he calls it the machine of ALP politics, but wasn’t he a beneficiary of that very machine anyway? BERNIE He's always been a beneficiary of the machine right back to really when his father died when he was 19, it was the Labour Party who ensured he was able to stay at university and finish off his degree. He's always called himself an outsider, but really he has been, I agree with Howard he's been the ultimate insider for a long time. SIMON David, the ALP's been in battle for some time now. How much more can it take? DAVID Well I think it depends a lot on how they react to these diaries, so far I think the reaction's been smart, trying not to engage too much in a slanging match. SIMON They’ve got no wiggle room anyway do they? DAVID No, and look Kim Beazley did have to respond to these allegations, these challenge the very fundamentals of who he is, Mark Latham accusing him of not being a decent man and Kim Beazely is a decent man, but I think the most hurtful thing no doubt would have been the suggestion he didn’t do enough back in I think it was 2000 when a Labour bank bencher Greg Wilton committed suicide, not doing enough to prevent that happening I think would have been quite hurtful to Kim Beazley and others in the Labour caucus, so he did have to respond to that, but as long as Labour doesn’t now descend into another slanging match which they tend to do very easily these days I think this will pass in a few weeks and be seen as a bit of a distraction. As I say as long as they can move beyond this. SIMON That’s a bit proviso though. On the wider scale of Australian politics what chances are there a new political entity can emerge from this? DAVID Ah look I can't see any new political party or new political force as such emerging from this, I don’t think Labour's that badly battered, Kim Beazley's certainly restoring a lot of confidence in the electorate in the Labour Party he is a well known and well regarded leader, certainly much better regarded than Simon Creen or Mark Latham, I think Bernie's quite right in saying Latham certainly did press some buttons during the 12 months or so that he was there that really excited the electorate and I think moreso than Creen and Beazley he did manage to wrong-foot Howard, he made him act on things like politicians’ superannuation and perks and on instituting an pneumococcal vaccine, he made Howard do things because Howard was spooked, but it's what happened after he lost that election, I think he could have survived as leader but he failed to take responsibility, he failed to say anything when the Asian tsunami struck and now as we've seen he's had this extraordinary spray it's made everyone look back and think wow what a mad leader he was. SIMON Andrew Denton on the ABC's Enough Rope on Thursday night said to Mark Latham ‘you have single-handedly disembowelled the Labour Party.’ John Hewson quoted in Crikey yesterday 'the tragedy is that Latham's performance as a political suicide bomber may distract from what should be a significant public debate. There is on both sides of politics a poisonous and corrosive culture' how right is he? BERNIE Oh well I think that balling inside politics is nothing new I mean every party has its factions, John Howards' Liberal Party they don’t really admit to the factions but they're there. This kind of bruising on the inside of politics is absolutely nothing new at all, and I'm really surprised that Latham has made as much of it as he has. I think disembowelled the Labour Party's a temporary thing. I agree with David I think they’ll get over it but the sad thing for the Labour Party is that all of their dirty washing is on display at the minute. SIMON Alright, now as the opposition may be disembowelling itself is there any downside to the government in this? DAVID No this is a smorgasbord of opportunity for people like Peter Costello and Tony Abbott, John Howard will stay out of this, I think that’s a safe prediction, he doesn’t want to muddy his hands with all this, it's an absolute field day for them. I think it does in a strange way have some upside for Kim Beazley in that it does draw the comparison between him and Mark Latham and people will go well thank God we've got Beazley there. SIMON Can't wait for the fallouts. David Spears from Sky News Australia and Bernie Lagan joining us from Sydney, thank you so much again for your time.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SIMON Needless to say television election coverage has come a long way since that first broadcast in 1966, tonight's coverage on TV1 will feature state of the art technology including a virtual parliament. Earlier on I spoke to Richard Harman Executive Producer of Decision 05 about what viewers can expect. RICHARD We've tried to focus coverage this time round on the vote that really matters which is the party vote, so we've redesigned all of our graphics, we've reconfigured the programme and we're focusing on that party vote and eventually on how many seats each party gets in the House so we can try and forecast who's gonna form the government. SIMON So will we still be seeing electorate results? RICHARD You will but what we're going to do is we're going to give update electorate results down the bottom to the screen and only put full screen electorate results up when we've got a final result except in Tauranga, Epsom and those seats which are gonna be on a real knife edge tonight. SIMON The real key electorates. Alright what are we gonna see visually? RICHARD Well as I said we've redesigned all the graphics and of course what we've also done is we're introducing some virtual reality graphics into the equation this year. Essentially virtual reality means that we can turn graphics into three dimensional shapes which can exist inside a studio, the presenter can manipulate them, play with them and we can actually give physical form to numbers and names. SIMON So we've already seen a hint of that on the news of course in the last couple of nights, so this is the virtual parliament where you literally see how the figures fall? RICHARD Yes I think we could perhaps offer it up to loser MPs and they could come in and strut their stuff in a virtual parliament even if they can't make it into the real one. SIMON What sort of numbers are involved in the team coverage? RICHARD I think there's nearly 200 people both TVNZ staff and outside contractors working on the production, one end of the country to the other, people up masts, people in remote places, an enormous number of people involved tonight. SIMON All across the board and right around the country? RICHARD Absolutely. SIMON West Coast. RICHARD The West Coast of course we've got, we're having a bit of fun on the Coast, and we've got Jeremy Wells and Newsboy and Hugh Sunday from TVNZ who are down there in Remington's Hotel bringing us the iconic voice of the coast. SIMON I'm sure you can trust them to behave accordingly. And who will actually be in here? RICHARD Right well presenting the show is Susan Wood will be the anchor and where we're sitting will be Mark Sainsbury and he'll have with him on this couch a panel of distinguished New Zealand politics figures, household names. We'll have the President of the Labour Party Mike Williams, we'll have the well known National Party strategist, Jeff Grant coming in during the evening, there'll be the Agenda panel, we'll have Bob Harvey and Michelle Boag, and we're gonna have Professor Matthew Palmer from Victoria University Law School and Derek Fox, Willie Jackson from Eye to Eye. SIMON So a movable feast here and at the other venue down the end? RICHARD At the other end we have those veteran political analysts and no election night without Colin James and no election night without the statistician Hugh Morton, and they’ll be there with Sue. SIMON So detail and events down there and more analysis down this end. RICHARD Yeah results down the other end and analysis down here and also Mark will be doing all the big interviews with the political leaders and around us there are screens, we've got OBs from one end of the country to the other. SIMON Outside broadcasts everywhere? And so he'll be doing interviews down the line with them, to the outside locations as well as doing the commentators here in the studio. RICHARD And the commentators can join in those interviews perhaps on occasions. SIMON So essentially in terms of the coverage then three points: Susan anchoring it at the far end from where we are now, here for the analysis, and downstairs in the other studio for the virtual parliaments. RICHARD Yes and don’t forget, I keep saying this to everybody, don’t forget that there are over 20 locations outside this building where staff are standing by and where One News Reporters are standing by, and they're with political leaders, political candidates and they're really on the front line of the story tonight. SIMON How quickly and how accurate will we get the results? RICHARD We're taking a feed directly from the Chief Electoral Office, the accuracy is up to them, how quickly we're getting that on air instantly it comes to us, just like a website. SIMON So the moment the information's available we can have it. RICHARD Yep, it'll be ticking away down at the bottom of the screen. SIMON There you have it – Decision 05 starts at 7pm right after One News. Transcripts are copyright to Front Page Ltd and may contain errors. They should be checked against a taped copy of the programme to ensure accuracy. 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