KEY POINTS:
Lights, camera, action and up popped the members of our Parliament in fair Aotearoa, raw and uncut, introduced with a stirring musical ta-ta-ra-ra and a haere mai.
The live webcast of Parliament began yesterday, costing $4 million to set up and watched at its busiest by up to 350 people at any one time, according to monitoring of the website's traffic.
Whether the live coverage - which it is hoped will be on a TV network next year - catches on remains to be seen and relies on the performers.
Yesterday the live feed showed four put on enough of a feisty performance to get kicked out of the House.
Under new rules, reaction shots are allowed, so we saw John Key and Bill English laughing like Statler and Waldorf on the Muppets after Annette King cast aspersions on Key's leadership abilities.
Wide shots are also allowed, giving parliamentary messengers with the misfortune to be sitting behind speaking MPs a whole new notoriety.
It also allows for more stunts - so all can see when Peter Brown holds up a graph showing the movement of the dollar as his leader, Winston Peters, quizzes the Finance Minister on it.
To help viewers get to know MPs better, captions showed who was who and what team they played for.
However, different action was screened by the television networks, who united in mutual defiance of a ban on using the footage for satire or to ridicule or denigrate MPs.
The first day of the new operation was the cue for civil disobedience.So while the live feed showed the robust debate, TV3 showed David Carter picking his nose. At least four MPs - Eric Roy, Peter Dunne, Winston Peters and Mahara Okeroa - had a snooze. TV One showed forbidden footage of Bob Clarkson leaving the House after refusing to apologise for calling someone a liar. Prime News showed possibly ill-gotten footage of MPs heckling.
Acting PM Michael Cullen called on moral authority from on high to justify the ban on satire. The Queen, he said, was probably on his side after the BBC screened a promo for a documentary which appeared to show her storming out of a photo-shoot with celebrity photographer Annie Liebovitz after being asked to remove her crown. It was actually footage of her walking into the photo shoot. New Zealand MPs, Cullen said, feared exactly the same happening to them.
"She [the Queen] in fact had a similar experience to what in fact we are quite worried about, which is the ability to manipulate pictures to present a false picture of what actually happened."
The party whips, at least, were well-prepped for being caught in the wide shots. Labour's Darren Hughes perched wide-eyed above Cullen's shoulder, nodding earnestly at every word said and laughing heartily at anything that sounded vaguely like a joke.
On the opposite side, Anne Tolley could be seen listening attentively to Key, shaking her head in dismay at the things her leader said Labour had done.
About 17 hours a week of live action will screen from Parliament on the internet and, it is hoped, somewhere on television next year.
Speaker Margaret Wilson said it would make Parliament more accessible for the public, and yesterday was "an important day for our democracy."
So there was the parliamentary logo at the bottom of the screen, just to let taxpayers know they were paying for democracy at a bargain price of $4.1 million to set up and $1.8 million a year to run.
