Mike Hosking: Sorry New Zealand. I'm guilty of an unspeakable crime. I misled you.
Opinion
My Christmas gift from the BSA, the Broadcasting Standards Authority, is I misled the nation. Sorry nation, I misled you.
I didn't of course, but they don't have a sense of humour, or indeed any understanding of the realities of broadcasting, like you shouldn't take everything literally.
This concernscomments I made on Seven Sharp regarding voting for the Maori Party. I said to Toni Street "you can't vote for the Maori Party because you are not on the Maori roll".
This was a throwaway line, it was a flippant remark given Toni was never voting for the Maori Party. The next night, after the aggrieved had hit the roof, I clarified the comment. My point was, and is, this: the Maori Party is not a list party. It is not a party that gets above 5 per cent of the vote.
Can you use your party or list vote to vote for them without being on the Maori roll? Of course.
I assumed that we all knew this given this is the system we have been operating under for 20 years. It was implied or inferred - on live telly you don't have time to outline literally every piece of minutiae, especially when you're firing off a one-liner.
So, I said for the Maori Party to get into Parliament, the way they were currently in Parliament they needed to win an electorate seat. And to vote for a person in a Maori electorate, you had to be enrolled on the Maori roll.
But the BSA was having none of it. And so sadly, once again, we have paid for a bunch of humourless earnest clipboarders to sit around pontificating and writing reports.
The irony being they decided a statement had to be made rectifying my outlandish behaviour, and it had to be done before Seven Sharp took a summer break.
