Paul Holmes Needs to Go.

When there are so few televised interviews where the movers and shakers of this country are questioned at length, in exchanges longer than a 30sec, why have do we have to suffer Paul Holmes as the interviewer?

The job of a good interviewer is draw information from the interviewee and provide the viewer with new insights into their opinions, knowledge and character. Shane Taurima understands this but Holmes continues to treat Q&A as a vehicle to push his own opinions and shape interviews around his personal thinking.

This morning he interviewed Russel Norman and Winston Peters regarding their views on the economic management of the country.  For anyone who genuinely wanted to hear how the Greens and New Zealand First would manage the country's purse strings, they wouldn't have been enlightened. Russel Norman has continually impressed with grasp of economics and presenting alternative strategies and Winston has had past experience as the Government Treasurer, yet neither had the opportunity to demonstrate the depth of their understanding or respective visions.

We had a series of quick fire questions where Holmes cut answers short to state his own opinion or, in Russel's case, stopped an interesting response with the promise he would allow time to elaborate on this later, but not doing so. Even though National's whole economic strategy is based on guestimates Holmes dismisses the Greens' revenue source as "fairyland" money and blocked Russel's attempt to show how Green policies would be funded. Rather than allowing the viewers to decide for themselves what they thought of Russel's policies, Holmes took it on himself to continually provide his own judgements both verbally or with his body language.

Russel and Winston were put in the situation that they had to continually battle to put forward their respective economic visions as Holmes continually yapped around them, interjecting and harrying them for no discernible reason other than maintaining his own presence.

We need a programme like BBC's Hard Talk where John Key's ignorance of science was revealed and his discomfort from truly probing questions. If only we could have the likes of Shane Taurima to prod, encourage and challenge an interviewee for at least half an hour. The viewer may then be able to appreciate what the Greens mean by green technologies and how we could use our SOE's to kick start businesses in the private sector. The viewers could then find out how Winston would reward "winners" and what sort of things could add value to our timber exports.