Q+A’s Panel Discussions With Paul Holmes, Dr Jon Johansson, Mike Moore & Sir Wira Gardiner.

The panel discussions 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

Response to LORD McNALLY interview

PAUL Welcome to the panel, how bad was the week for Gordon, Mr Moore?

MIKE MOORE – Former Prime Minister
It was dreadful, let's face it.

PAUL A lifelong Labour voter.

MIKE Yes these things happen, it was dreadful, he may well have been right of course, but here's one thing, there are more Conservative seats where the Lib-Dems are closer to than Labour, and you could well see something very strange happen here, where the Libs could actually get more votes than Labour but we could get more seats, and then something strange would begin to happen.

PAUL Which is one of the perfidy's of course of the first past the post system. Let's just make a note again of what he said about the economy.

Lord McNally: 'We understand the seriousness of the economic situation and therefore we are not gonna leave the country without government and rudderless whilst we have a long protracted wrangle about coalition or whatever.'

PAUL Which takes us back to a historic few months doesn’t it?

JON JOHANSSON – Political Analyst
Yeah well you know no society really suffers during that interregnum I have to say…

MIKE I don’t know about that.

JON Well three months we managed to get on. The economy though is front and centre, so okay this chap also says that he thinks that they should also continue stimulatory politics so that there's not a chance of a double dip recession, but you know you can't help but think that one of the underlying constructs of this election is that it actually might be a good one to lose, that you're inheriting such a difficult and problematic set of choices that you know I've seen some analyses that say that say whoever wins this election could then be out of power for a generation.

PAUL Mervyn King the Governor of the Bank of England says that, the cuts are gonna have to be so steep and so ruthless that whoever implements them will be out of power for generations.

MIKE Bit like 1984 in Labour.

SIR WIRA GARDINER – Ngati Awa
But that aside, wouldn’t it make sense from what the Chairman's saying for the back room boys to be talking now, because I think his point is right, the northern hemisphere's in such bad straits in terms of the economies, that they really have to move very fast and I would suspect that some of those phones are going now, and the deal making probably won't allow much more than a short period of time.

JON And the Lib-Dems also have to be able to cut off with the past, the idea that a vote for them creates uncertainty.

MIKE It's always the things you don’t expect, it's the charming phrase 'The Pigs', Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain, and the Euro, and when Sorris and others are betting against the Euro surviving, something very bad is beginning to happen, so it is like 1984 and the election of the Labour government where somebody's gonna have to be a total bastard here.

PAUL How bad is their economy do you think, the British economy, or the European economies?

MIKE Well I think they're very bad. I mean everybody's stimulating everybody's borrowed and well you should have to get over what – don’t forget this was the greatest global crisis in a lifetime, somehow we think it's over, it is not, now we have to pay back, and phase that payback, not at the cost of growth, and that’s a finely balanced thing, and don’t forget the Libs are a bit vulnerable here, and I suspect this week you'll see a lot of attacks on the Libs who suggested Britain ought to go into the Euro. I know Nick Clegg, he's a good guy by the way, he's got five languages, he's good on trade, but he was for the Euro and Gordon Brown and the Tories are against, I suspect they’ll try to hang that round him.

PAUL Nick Clegg has big ambitions though, I mean I think he said this week well he wants to be Prime Minister, so they may not be talking yet, they may simply not yet be doing that.

SIR WIRA No no I mean they're clearly buoyed by what's happening in the polls, and I think you know he might decide to go at putting that out, but I think that doesn’t contribute towards the stability post election, the reality is, is that the Conservatives are probably going to get there, and I suspect actually the kind of things that are happening to Gordon Brown in the last day or so may pull Labour voters back, you know that kind of call to the pumps and come back to the Labour Party and get us through, otherwise we're in the worst defeat since 1918.

PAUL Can I just remind you of what said about the historic nature of this election, here's Tom McNally again.

Lord McNally: 'And I hope that it's one of those times that come once or twice in a century, that a country really takes a decision that it wants a complete change of direction, a sense of renewal.'

PAUL Once or twice in a century election.

JON Well it is, you have two parties that represent change, whether it's Cameron's Conservatives or the Liberal Democrats, but if there is real underlying, the desire of the English electorate, the UK electorate is actually for root and branch institutional change.

PAUL Reform?

JON Yeah real reform like electoral system reform, well then the Liberal Democrats are gonna hold up.

MIKE Tie-ho a little, we've had this with the Lib-Labour coalition with Callahan in a life time, I don’t think they're gonna throw out 200 and 300 years of parliamentary experience because everyone's pissed off with their politicians.

PAUL Yeah but the Liberals didn’t quite have the traction that this crowd seems to have.

MIKE That’s true, but don’t forget their leader, Steele, just before the election told them to go home and prepare for government, we've seen this before, this is a plague on both your houses.

PAUL Tell me, we mentioned earlier on the programme that the election was considered what a couple of months ago to be David Cameron's to lose, why hasn’t Cameron been able quite to grasp the country, to take the country with him?

SIR WIRA Well I think that’s the point I was gonna make earlier, we were talking about Brown and the Liberal Democrats, actually the Conservatives should be really worried too, because they had it to win and it seems to be slipping away from their grasp, if not in terms of the electoral outcome on Thursday, certainly in terms of the ability to negotiate, for Cameron to get the policy planks that he's go, I think that’s a worry.

MIKE People are sick of all the politicians, we've gone through that in New Zealand and they’ve gone through it in Australia, and whoever's the least known person on those debates wins, and the first time the Brits have done it, and Clegg is a smart guy, he looks good, he sounds good, and he is good.

PAUL You mentioned his other languages too, I heard him, I saw him on a You Tube thing the other day talking to a Dutch journalist in Dutch.

MIKE Four or five languages but he's careful not to talk too much about that in England, because people don’t like it.

PAUL Have you got a quick prediction, Jon.

JON Well Clegg gets a pass on his middleclass upbringing in a way that Cameron does not, and there's still a residual resistance to the idea of the bunch of toffs leading the country and so the Conservative need to get over 38% really to have a crack and they are struggling.

*********

In response to HONE HARAWIRA interview

PAUL Would it be fair to say that for the majority of people around the country that look at this United Nations Declaration of Rights of Indigenous People and they see a can of worms coming on shore, what do you think?

MIKE I think many lawyers and others do but let's think where this is going. Tuhoe have got a case going where they're talking self government, the Ureweras are not co-managed but owned by Tuhoe, tinorangatiratanga means absolute sovereignty, the right to make and enforce laws, this is not a small thing, we keep going back to the Treaty, well in 1840 Alaska was part of Russia, there was no country called Italy or Germany, and I think we have to have a very serious conversation about what this means, and all government departments evolved to a tribal unit within 40 years, the coast, well is that our ports, is that the Cook Strait cable, I think adults have to carefully work this through, and I think we need to be slightly more robust about this. This is a nation changer, this is not a small thing.

PAUL Wira what's you're perspective?

SIR WIRA I think that from my point of view that I woke up this morning and I still had to drive within the law to the airport, the constitution and the framework of our country doesn’t change because the United Nations moves a particular resolution. The second thing is this is a relationship document and I think it is aspirational, I think Mike's right, we've gotta develop what it means, but the fact of the matter is in terms of the Treaty which was a looser document at least the semantics of it was much wider, we've got Maori radio, Maori TV, the Maori Language Commission, and a whole host of activities which come because of the development of the relationship, and I think my sense to New Zealanders is don’t spook at it, look at the semantics and put it within the context of current society, and I think that we might just be a little bit more measured about it.

JON But I mean I agree with all of that Wira, but you look at the optics of this and you have Pita Sharples stepping into Manhattan in the middle of the night unbeknownst to New Zealanders right, so what is that saying about the quality of leadership to lead a debate about ….

PAUL What does it tell us about the strategy?

JON Well it certainly wasn’t mana enhancing Paul.

MIKE When …. says let's abolish the dole for Maori, only Maori, what's he's really saying is the dole payments go to someone else who clip it and hand it on, these are very serious issues. If we believe in the sovereignty of parliament, parliament can devolve issues, but can it devolve some things that later generations will be anxious about, in the absence of a constitution parliament must be supreme, it is parliament and democracy that decides yes you can have a Maori radio….

SIR WIRA Let me put it into context of the world, the western world, how many countries haven't signed it, the Americans, the Canadians, the Australians, and New Zealand. Australia has now signed it, New Zealand's now signed it, which has left the Americans ….

MIKE And we put a covenant on it saying it's meaningless.

PAUL That’s right, all we've got to get is an activist judge or two.

SIR WIRA The Declaration of Independence of 1835 is used by northerners regularly to argue their case, no court recognises it, the Treaty of Waitangi acknowledges it, but it does not give force to the deliberations of those instruments.

MIKE I'll go back to a wider bigger picture of a process of how we put these things in order, because we're going into territory that our society is not ready for, some are, but when you say absolute sovereignty is the right to make and enforce laws, do we really mean that, when we decide that we're a bicultural society, not a multicultural society, without cabinet or parliament….

JON And it's in defiance of our demographics.

MIKE Well in reality I'm a sickly white Liberal, I've spent most of my life advancing these causes, but I think we need a wider process beyond the passions of one parliament or some sort of coalition deal to stitch up another five years in government.

PAUL So a wider discussion is perhaps needed is what you're both talking about I guess, but Wira says relax.

MIKE No Wira's right, I mean I don’t think we should you know – it has not yet – it's what it could be.

PAUL Yeah I understand. We've gotta move on, let's talk about the week coming, I spose we'll all be paying particular attention to the polling in the UK during the week.

JON Yeah you bet, I'm also very interested to see the government's reaction to 40,000 of its citizens walking down Queen Street yesterday.

PAUL That came out of nowhere didn’t it?

MIKE And I think there'll be some more Budget leaks, to prepare ourselves… And if this government decides to move on the obscenity of our tax laws and second, I just bought another property, I can write all sorts of things off, we have thousands of people earning more than 100,000 dollars a year who on family support because they have second and third properties, so our tax laws say the boss can get out of it and his worker can't, and if the National Party move on this they’ll be hounded of course, but good for them.

PAUL But let me get a prediction from each of you on the British election whose result we should probably know by what next Friday night in New Zealand, what do you think.

SIR WIRA I think that the Tories will win, I think Labour will claw back and it may not be as tight as we see it in the last week or so.

PAUL Do you think the Conservatives will have to do a deal with the Lib-Dems?

SIR WIRA I think so, the way the polls are going.

JON I think the Tories will probably sneak it, and I think the lesson to New Zealanders actually will be to let's stick with MMP because this is in the direction of some of those options that are being put.

PAUL Yes he said we'll come and have a look at MMP.

MIKE I think a minority Conservative government, a new Labour Leader by the following week, and a new election within two years.

PAUL I mean Gordon Brown cannot win really can he? No.

ENDS

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