Mike Hosking: 'Pontificating' Broadcasting Standards Authority humourless earnest clipboarders

Mike Hosking: Sorry New Zealand. I'm guilty of an unspeakable crime. I misled you.

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 concerns comments 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.

They released their report yesterday - five days after the show had gone off-air. And they might have known the show had gone off air, because the final show got quite a bit of coverage for other reasons.

So what has been achieved here? Nothing. The show is finished. The election is over. I've quit.

We have paid for what? What changes? What's the point? The only clarification needed is why we have a BSA that busies itself with such nonsense.