Heh, everybody says that (including me) but if people were that responsive to the actions of politicians, Labour would probably be polling at…er, much much lower.

Left/right won’t work, Dunne, Peters and the Maori party would argue too much about which side to go on. Keep it simple.

Two candidates enter, one candidate leaves!

But the thing is, they’re all competing for the votes of the coalition partners – no party really wants to be in a coalition, they’d much rather govern alone. Course maybe they’re all a bunch of self interested pricks who might stitch up a deal beforehand, and just spend the debate having a go at the ‘enemy’ parties, I dunno.

If you have to have a debate then the minors should be included as well. Like it or not this is a MMP system and all of them have a say. But, this is New Zealand. Labour has turned this into one of the more undemocratic countries in the world so I’m not surprised that both Key and Clark are willing to have a solo debate. They willingly lock out the others.

Whichever way you cut it, it’s stuffed.

You may also get some really informative discussions in the “left” and “right” debates as they talk about what pace or what blend of policies is best, rather than the normal we are good you are evil rhetoric.

Yeah! I’d much rather see left parties scoring points off of other left parties – if it means not hearing the phrase ‘secret agenda’ during the debates, i’m for it. Mind you, Clark would look pretty nutty going on about that during a debate – would probably get Anderton to do the dirty stuff like in 2005.

Hell Key is on thin ice himself.

As always the left are by their nature not team players and fractional with their debates all being “en masse”. I understand theres a word for that.

The networks won’t run with this for the same reason they have canned the minor party debate. Not commercially viable – typical of Laila Harre to suggest something that’s impractical and involves other peoples’ money.

A commercially viable solution is to have two debates:
1/ All parties
2/ The two major leaders.

‘Left’ and ‘right’ is so-o-o 20th century…

how about

“emotional children” vs. “rational adults”?

“insane” vs. “sane”?

“common sense” vs. “liberal inability to decide”?

“corrupt” vs. “suggested to be corrupt”?

the greens would get a lot of debating time using these measures

im all for key v clarke! all they need to do now is to put her in a booth so she cant drown key out by husterically screaming “loss of jobs” “national will sell everything” etc

Score 10 points to H2 for fooling the Nats into flicking off the public.