[General] TV3 is not cool. INXS was cool.

ED: Welcome to our newest Hammer Correspondent: Scott AKA Scottrod AKA The Galvanator AKA KickAss Kommentator. Actually I made all of those up. Lets all give Scott a warm round of applause and have a read of his first post...


TV3 have just announced they aint letting either the Progressives (Jim Anderton's band) or United Future (Peter Dunne's new Christian sound) on their rocking debate show. Their reasoning seems to be based on the latest opinion polls. They set a threshold based on trying to get a perfect number of bands on telly, and polling data to tell us who's hot. A brave move, considering the number of complaints about polling effecting election outcomes. Now it also effects election coverage. Or am I being unfair?

After all, the Progressives and United are far more likely to get in than is ACT, but ACT makes it onto the stage. The Greens are arguably less likely to get in than Jim and Pete's parties, as both the old fogies have electorates that love em. But ACT and the Greens get to role out their classic numbers for us all to peruse.

So in what way am I being unfair? Oops, looks like I've just given yet another reason why TV3 screwed up.

OK, lets try that again... Or am I being unfair?

After all TV3 pays a lot of money to guys to work these things out. These "working out guys" will hopefully, one day, eventually, work for these parties, or maybe even run for office, so you would expect them to treat others how they want to be treated when they work for... Nope still can't do it. Can't come up with a reason why we can't see the eight leaders of the parties which represent us in parliament on TV3 for their measly hour long special. They had this problem on West Wing. The HypathetiNetworks wouldn't run full coverage of the election for president. So Tobey eventually pointed out that the government owns the damned airwaves, so maybe the networks should poney up with some decent coverage for a coupla days, or else stop using our airwaves for the other 363-odd days.

Maybe we could do without Simpsons repeats for half an hour a day, for a week. I do love the Simpsons, but voter ignorance and my own curiosity would have to weigh something. Give every party ten minutes to talk. Then every party gets a question for two other parties of their choice. Then they can all bicker in the hourlong special. Better yet, let's vote to see which TV3 program you can do without for a week, or a month, so that we can watch people who want to make laws talk about why. If TV3 thinks using poll data is fair to see which political party ends up on TV, it should run a poll to see which of it's TV programs currently rate better than a political debate would. Any under that number should be tossed aside for political debate. That seems to be what they are arguing is fair. Fair is fair.