Sunday 22nd August, 2010

The panel discussions between Paul Holmes, Dr Therese Arseneau, Stephen Franks & Katherine Rich have been transcribed below. The full length video interviews and panel discussions from this morning’s Q+A can also be seen on tvnz.co.nz at, http://tvnz.co.nz/q-and-a-news

Q+A is repeated on TVNZ 7 at 9.10pm on Sunday nights and 10.10am and 2.10pm on Mondays.

PANEL DISCUSSIONS led by PAUL HOLMES

In response to GUYON ESPINER interview

PAUL Time to welcome our panel, welcome to all of you. The Australian election, what do you make of it Therese?

THERESE ARSENEAU – Political Analyst
Well it’ll be really interesting to watch the next couple of weeks in terms of government formation. Apparently there were a record number of postal ballots that still need to be counted, those could be decisive. The reality is that in the Australian system the government is formed by the result in the House of Representatives, and so it is really on a knife’s edge there, and it comes down to not who necessarily whichever major party gets the most seats, but rather who can maintain the confidence of the House. But the other wrinkle is that in the Australian system of course they have a very effective upper house, the Senate, and although that’s not where government is created, it can make a difference, and so the Independents have already indicated that they will take into account what the outcome in the Senate is, because they know they need to be able to get legislation through, and there the Greens hold the balance of power. So their Labour may have the stronger position. It’ll be an interesting government formation process.

PAUL Yes but in the end if you lose your 13 seats do you really have the legitimacy to form a government, what do you think Stephen? Bottom line I mean.

STEPHEN FRANKS – Franks & Ogilvie
Well these are constitutional conventions, they're very interesting to someone interested in constitutional law. I look at it more just from New Zealand’s perspective, that when your friend, when your closest friend is distracted and there are arguments about whether you’ve got real authority and your clout in either House is uncertain, it's usually a sorry thing. Much better to have a predictable confident friend than someone who's constantly having to guard themselves against internal division.

PAUL Yes all of which may be the case but what do you make of the election result last night?

STEPHEN Well I'm just a bit scared of trying to expert on something I'm really ignorant on, I mean I follow it out of interest and comparison, but I probably can't add much more than to say …

KATHERINE RICH – NZ Food & Grocery Council CEO
Well I think the amazing thing is that it came so close. I mean it looked as if everything was in Labour’s favour but over a period of time that swing away from them, the Queensland people spoke and said that they didn’t like their guy being assassinated largely, and also I think some of the other problems came home to roost, such as misspending, and also the warring within the Labour factions, leaking of what Gillard was saying and secret caucus discussions.

THERESE But the big question is looking forward, can either of these government's, whatever one gets to form government, how long can they last in such a divided House of Representatives, in such a fractious upper house of the Senate. Are we looking at a very soon, sooner rather than later, a double dissolution election?

KATHERINE We won’t know for a matter of days, but government's have been cobbled together with even slimmer margins, it depends on the negotiations, and it’ll be interesting in the next couple of days.

STEPHEN The difference I would say though, if Labour get through is the distraction of their internal strife, because having turned such a strong position round, there’ll be a hundred different theories as to why, there’ll be a whole lot of blame going on.

THERESE And blood will be let.

STEPHEN So that’s a problem, so that in a sense even if they get a government…

PAUL That’s right if you can't form a government quite quickly the factions will start to do their public analysis, that’s right. But isn’t it a damnable thing, you think you're doing the right thing, you’ve got this incredibly suddenly unpopular Prime Minister, you think well we've got to save the party and save the government, you get rid of the most unpopular Prime Minister and then the state where he comes from they just turn on you.

THERESE But it's also a lesson to not panic, and not to be driven entirely by polls. So you know I think there's some valuable lessons there and how quickly things can turn around in politics.

PAUL Speaking of things turning around quickly let us have a look at the ACT Party. Did the ACT Party implode this week Stephen, what happened?

STEPHEN I've got ethical duty, I'm happy to talk about the future and the past but I won’t talk about things that I've been directly involved in.

PAUL Well Heather was trying to roll him wasn’t she with this joker?

STEPHEN I'm instructed no, in fact I've seen nothing to suggest she was, but I don’t really want to go any further than that.

PAUL What do you think?

THERESE Well I think Rodney Hide himself said that ACT was in the death zone before all this happened, and the reality is in politics it basically never helps you to have this sort of internal fighting made public. So the reality is you know they truly are in the death zone. But the good thing going for ACT is there actually is legitimate policy space for them on the spectrum, that you know for a principal party of the right there is potential, real success there, because National has moved towards the centre, it's freed up space and National basically in terms of the political landscape, National really wants Act there I would think and needs them there.

PAUL A quick word from you on ACT?

KATHERINE Well this is the time ACT should be making the most of the space that National was allowing them to have but with five people two factions it doesn’t get more intense than that, but if they don’t work it out they're going to have problems in the long term.

PAUL What about Rodney in Epsom, is he secure there?

KATHERINE Well he works the electorate very well as a local MP, I mean certainly around Newmarket he's treated as a de facto mayor, but unless they start talking ACT policies and get on the road and look far more cohesive, I don’t think they're going to have a show.

THERESE They need to decide what sort of right wing party they want to be, and you know what their principles are, what they stand for.

PAUL Yes it turned out very strange in the end, it ended not with a bang but a whimper, and Rodney still appears to be in charge, and in private conversation seems to be quite calm about the way everything happened.

THERESE But it's quite hard for the smaller parties generally cos their share of the vote in the last two elections has dropped

KATHERINE Apparently he is that party.

*********

In response to SIMON POWER interview

PAUL By the looks of things Power is going back to the local community, here's what he had to say on this.

Simon Power: ‘If a local community decides to adopt a local alcohol plan, they will be able to produce an environment which makes liquor licenses harder to get. Local communities will be able to object on the basis of things like density, locality, hours of trade, that is not the case at the moment.’

Which is really what the people of Manukau City were asking for Stephen wasn’t it?

STEPHEN It sounds like it. It sounds like a fantastic opportunity for legal practice, I mean there's just so many uncertainties in there and he kept saying there’ll be appeal rights and there'll be a reasonableness requirement, I can imagine there’ll be people salivating and getting out their textbooks right away.

PAUL Yes you're right, there's something that’s not simple enough in there it would seem, I mean you’ve also got he says there’ll be checks on areas going completely wowser and so forth, but that’s lawyers again isn’t it?

STEPHEN What I was waiting for, it might be unfair because it might be tomorrow, is what about the personal responsibility, what about the drunkenness offence, what about kids who are drinking under age actually facing an offence, as you and I did when we grew up, because this is all focused around supply and they’ve been fiddling width supply restrictions for generations. It really needs to be different, if you want to be a France or a Germany, responsibility should be personal.

PAUL Interesting point, yes failure to address personal responsibility.

THERESE Well we don’t know yet what's in the legislation it's certainly there in the Law Commission report.

STEPHEN Just one thing, it just said they have to pay for the cost of being taken home.

THERESE No, but there's also more responsibility around supplying alcohol to under age people under 18.

STEPHEN It's still on supply, it's not on the individual.

THERESE But it's also – the interesting thing about the Law Commission report, underneath it all is also a subtext that there is a personal responsibility for people to change their definition of what is risky drinking, that in the Law Commission itself it says that we personally think it's acceptable to drink more than what they think ….

PAUL But 13 year old, 14 year old, 15 year old, see the thing as legitimate and they go to a place like a place like Manukau City where nobody’s gonna give a darn really if a person is obviously not of age, and that’s one thing he's starting to address, he's gonna make liquor licenses harder to get, easier to lose.

KATHERINE Well that’s the area, that’s one of the areas where there has been community concern and this is why I think the government should be commended for the process that it has run, because it has said we're going to look at the areas of harm, we're not going to consider changes that will affect the lives of moderate drinkers and people who do so responsibly. So looking at teen drinking, looking at some concerns about licensing, who knows what's going to be in the rest of it tomorrow, but I think that they have had a thorough process, and will flag some of the changes they want to make.

THERESE I agree with Katherine that the process for this legislation is a really good example of how good and enduring public policy comes about. I mean it started with an evidence based report from the Law Commission, it has a Minister who has tried to get bipartisan support and in his counterpart in the Labour Party Leanne Dalziel also somebody who's willing to put good public policy ahead of partisan politics. So you know I'm very hopeful …

PAUL And it's a Minister who's informed about the person waiting at home, but it's not good for the person waiting at home and it's probably not good for the person who's lining up at 4.30 in the morning to get into a bar. Supermarkets, the villains perhaps in some people’s eyes. He's gonna ask you people for some more responsibility on your pricing. But of course you'd love to use it as a loss leader.

KATHERINE Well I represent grocery supplies, not the supermarkets themselves, but some would argue that supermarkets are brightly lit places where it's much easier to scrutinise who is purchasing alcohol than in some other places. In terms of the hours I don’t think the supermarkets are going to be too concerned with that, I mean it will be a pain though if each and every council is going to have a different view on the implementation of licensing, because I mean we're a small country of four million people.

PAUL Well yes but if the community wants it…

KATHERINE You want a smooth business environment.

PAUL The drink driving. Are they copping out on the drink driving number?

STEPHEN It was interesting when he said we're looking at people who have had any previous offence, they’ll have a zero limit, and at the bottom of all this lies people’s mistrust of enforceability. We are woozy about enforcing stuff. I worked in Sweden many years ago. If you're a professional driver you lost your license and there was no prospect of getting it back, you had more penalty than someone else. We're always making little rules around the edge that make it a little bit easier.

PAUL But in terms of selling it to the public Stephen Joyce says I can drink three quarters of a bottle of wine and get into a car and I'm still legal, what kind of a picture is that if you don’t address it?

KATHERINE Well they’ve said they're going to continue to look for research, I think they’ve made the right call because looking at the number of accidents within that barrier, it's not too much of an issue, the government said harm minimisation….

In response to JIM ANDERTON AND BOB PARKER interview

PAUL You were making a very interesting remark about Jim Anderton Stephen Franks.

STEPHEN Well it's just that he's been plainly an effective Minister decisive and the rest but he's lost a lot of people from parties and with a council you actually don’t have ministerial power, you’ve gotta draw them with you, and in my time he even lost Matt McCarten who was one of the nicest guys you could think of. Can he hold a council together?

PAUL He pushes people away is what you are saying yes?

THERESE A mayor’s power is the power to persuade.

STEPHEN Yes it is.

THERESE Well I think the thing to take from this is that Christchurch has a cracker of an election, we have two heavyweight candidates, who express very clear but different visions for the city, so you know you can get distracted by the red herrings, you know the two job gem or the role of the mayor has, but I think Christchurch voters know that something far more important is happening in this election, and it's happening also at the council level. There's a real battle at the council level, and as you point out the council cannot be ignored, it's extremely important.

KATHERINE I think it's interesting to see the difference in Jim, he can often come across as a grump, but in this campaign he's animated and buoyant, and I think - the centre right won’t like it but it seems he's going to roll into town like a panzer tank.

PAUL I know he's got the real twinkle in the eye, I haven’t seen it in years, I want to burst out laughing all the time, as a matter of face. Mr Parker’s attempting to put fluoridation on him, and it didn’t quite work.

STEPHEN He didn’t get away from it entirely.

THERESE No, but again you have to ask yourself what is going to be the decisive issue that makes voters decide one candidate over the other. I'm not convinced it's fluoridation, and you know Parker’s problem has been the process that he's be using. There a perception around town that there hasn’t been enough transparency, not enough consultation.

KATHERINE Property purchase.

THERESE But we haven’t – the incumbent mayor has not lost in a first term in over 30 years so it would be an interesting election if that happened.

PAUL Yes, but Anderton would he be the most experienced campaigner in this country. When he turns his attention he can be a steamroller, it's hard to beat that

THERESE And he's got the organisation, he's got a machine in Christchurch that is just phenomenal, but isn’t it interesting again, and we talked about this in terms of Auckland, how the two major parties are there, you know Labour backing Anderton, National is helping Parker.

PAUL The week ahead what's coming up, Therese.

THERESE Ooh, apparently there's another billboard campaign about to start concerning foreign ownership, so I think foreign ownership will be an issue again, and of course the Foreshore and Seabed legislation, on the back of a previous billboard campaign last week, so both key issues I think this week.

PAUL What would you look for, Foreshore and Seabed?

STEPHEN As the biggest? No, I think liquor will be the early part of the week, and it depends whether they're actually on time with Foreshore and Seabed. There's some very irreconcilable stresses going on there, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it's not slightly delayed.

PAUL Where do you put Winston currently in all of this?

KATHERINE Well it depends where Winston wants to put himself, he keeps popping up and discussing, standing in Helensville which seems to be a cunning plan of getting the maximum amount of media coverage. You know he will pop up again.

STEPHEN If there's no one else on Foreshore and Seabed he’ll inherit a bit chunk of the electorate. If none of the mainstream parties can give voice to people’s concerns, he’ll do it.

KATHERINE Oh I'm sorry did you mean Foreshore and Seabed? I mean most certainly he’ll make hay of that. It's a good way of garnering support.

PAUL That’s right, he may feel that certain stars are aligning.

ENDS

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