I write notes for my appearances on RNZ’s The Panel, and while I don’t read them verbatim, they are useful for copying and pasting into this blog afterwards. (Anyone who has ever attended a conference where I’ve spoken might find this familiar: I’ll upload the notes but they aren’t a word-for-word reflection of what I said.)

Last Wednesday’s notes for ‘I’ve been thinking’ are:

I’ve been thinking that we pay our politicians a lot, and in some cases we get value for money. But I want politicians to be pragmatists, not ideologues. No government is perfect, and ours isn’t. When ours makes mistakes, what does the opposition do? Spout more ideology, rather than do the hard yards and genuinely figure out how to fix things. There are some incredibly able MPs in National, some of whom I know well. Yet they’re not the loudmouths who get press. Why are we giving these folks air time when they don’t do their homework, don’t have basic awareness of Kiwi political history, and what makes economies work? Why do some media talking heads fawn over them, looking at them doey-eyed like Stephen Colbert looks at Jacinda Ardern? I thought by the time you’re 25 you have a reasonable understanding of actions and consequences, and spouting ideology in the hope that a little gaslighting might fool voters isn’t going to swing this swing voter. George Gair, whose politics were similar to my own, would not recognize his party, and neither do I.

You can find the three parts here on the RNZ website: the pre-Panel, part one, and part two. Wallace and Sally were in the Auckland studio, while I was in the Wellington one, trying not to change Kathryn Ryan’s desk set-up. I have to say Wallace is a very capable host as he knows I can’t see them, so he’ll give me little nudges where I can chime in. It was nice to be back on after six months and hopefully I kept up the notion that RNZ National is for the thinking New Zealander.